Michelangelo continued to work till his eighty-ninth year. In 1563, at the request of Pius IV, he transformed a part of the Baths of Diocletian into the church and convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli. He designed the Porta Pia, one of the city gates. He made for the Florentines in Rome a model for a church; Vasari, perhaps too enthusiastic about his old teacher and friend, pronounced the proposed building “as beautiful as ever man beheld”;62 but Florentine funds in Rome ran short, and the edifice was never built.
At last the Titan’s incredible energy failed. About his seventy-third year he had begun to suffer from the stone. He seems to have found some palliative in medicine or mineral waters, but, he said, “I put more faith in prayers than in medicines.” Twelve years later he wrote to a nephew: “As regards my condition, I am ill with all the troubles that are wont to afflict old men. The stone prevents me from passing water. My loins and back are so stiff that I often cannot climb upstairs.”63 Yet till his ninetieth year he went out in all weathers.
He took the approach of death with religious resignation and philosophical good humor. “I am so old,” he remarked to Vasari, “that death often pulls me by the cape and bids me go with him.”64 A famous bronze relief by Daniele da Volterra shows a face lined with pain and haggard with age. In February, 1564, he grew weaker day by day, and spent most of the time sleeping in his old armchair. He made no will, but merely “left his soul to God, his body to the earth, and his goods to his nearest relations.”65 He died on February 18, 1564, aged eighty-nine. His body was taken to Florence and was buried in the church of Santa Croce, with ceremonies that lasted several days. Vasari devotedly designed for him a sumptuous tomb.
It was the judgment of some contemporaries, and has been the judgment of time, that despite a multitude of defects he was the greatest artist who ever lived. He exemplified fully the definition given by Ruskin of “the greatest artist”—as he “who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas”—i.e., ideas that “exercise and exalt the highest faculties of the mind.”66 He was, to begin with, a master draftsman whose drawings were among the most treasured gifts and thefts of his friends. We can see some of these drawings today in the Casa Buonarroti at Florence or in the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre: sketches for the façade of San Lorenzo, or for The Last Judgment, a lovely study for a sibyl, a St. Anne almost as subtly conceived as Leonardo’s, and the strange drawing he made of Vittoria Colonna dead, with mystic countenance and wasted breasts. In one of the conversations reported by Francisco de Hollanda he reduced all arts to design:
The science of design, or of fine drawing.… is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture, and of every form of representation, as well too as of all the sciences. He who has made himself a master in this art possesses a great treasure…. All the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.67
As a painter he remained a draftsman, far less interested in color than in line, seeking above all to draw an expressive form, to fix in art some human attitude, or to convey through a design a philosophy of life. The hand was that of Pheidias or Apelles, the voice was Jeremiah’s or Dante’s. On one of his passages between Florence and Rome he must have stopped at Orvieto and studied the nudes that Signorelli had painted there; these, and the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio, gave some hints to a style that was nevertheless unlike anything else that history has preserved. Far beyond and above the others, even beyond Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian, he brought to his art, and brought out in his art, nobility. He did not dally with decoration or triviality; he cared nothing for prettiness, landscapes, architectural backgrounds, arabesques; he let his subject stand out stark and unadorned. His mind was caught by a high vision, to which he gave form, as well as the hand could, in the shape of sibyls, prophets, saints, heroes, and gods. His art used the human body as its medium, but those human forms were to him the tortured embodiments of his hopes and terrors, his confused philosophy, and his smoldering religious faith.
Sculpture was his favorite and characteristic art because it is the preeminent art of form. He never colored his statues, feeling that form was enough; even bronze had too much color for him, and he confined his sculpture to marble.68 Whatever he painted or built was sculptural, even to St. Peter’s dome. He failed as an architect (barring that sublime cupola) because he could hardly conceive a building except in terms and proportions of the human body, and could barely suffer it to be more than a receptacle of statuary; he wanted to cover all surfaces, instead of making surfaces an element of form. Sculpture was a fever with him; the marble, he thought, obdurately hid a secret, which he was resolved to extricate; but the secret was in himself, and was too intimate for full revelation. Donatello helped him a little, della Quercia more, the Greeks less, in the struggle to give the inner vision outward form. He agreed with the Greeks in devoting most of his art to the body, leaving the faces generalized and almost stereotyped, as in the female figures on the Medici tombs; but he never achieved—his temper would not let him care for—the unimpassioned repose of Greek statuary before the Hellenistic age. He had no use for a form that did not express feeling. He lacked the classic restraint and sense of proportion; he made shoulders too broad for the head, trunks too mighty for the limbs, and limbs knotted with muscles, as if all men and gods were wrestlers taut with strife. It must be admitted that in these dramatic exaggerations of effort and emotion the art of the mannerists and the baroque was born.
Michelangelo did not found a school as Raphael did, but he trained some distinguished artists, and wielded pervasive influence. One pupil, Guglielmo della Porta, designed for Paul III, in St. Peter’s, a mausoleum that could almost bear comparison with the tombs of the Medici. But generally the successors of Angelo in sculpture and painting imitated his excesses without redeeming them with his depth of thought and feeling and his technical mastery. Usually a supreme artist is the culmination of a tradition, method, style, and historical mood; his very superiority fulfills and exhausts a line of development, so that after him must come a period of helpless imitation and decline. Then slowly a new mood and tradition grow; a new conception, ideal, or technique struggles through a hundred bizarre experiments to find another discipline, some original and freshly revealing form.