ITALIAN

Volume I

STUDIES
1938
Number 4

Published by Maney Publishing (c) The Society for Italian Studies

MICHELANGELO AND DANTE.1

Luigi Venturi at the close of an essay on Michelangelo bids his reader accompany him to SantaCroce and look upon the monument to Dante and the tombs of Michelangeloand Galileo, creatori d'una nuova lingua, d'una nuova arte, d'una nuova filosofia.,,2 Galileo died in the year that Newton was born (1642), and was born three days before Michelangelo died, in 1564. Galileo was no poet, even if the eight poems attributed to him were really his handiwork; but he was, at least in youth, a Dantista, and for him Dante was il gran Poeta." When a rising mathematician at Pisa, he took his chance of appearing before the Accademia Grande and delivering two lectures on the shape and size of the Inferno. Herein he was breaking a lance on behalf of Florentine scholarship in the infernal" war which had been begun over forty years before by Alessandro Yeilutello of Lucca.3 In 1544 Yellutello had published a commentary on the Commedia containing an attack upon the views as to the topography of the Inferno which had been put forward by Benivieni as representing Manetti's theories and had later been championed by the Accademia Grande. Next year, Michelangelo in a letter to his nephew Lionardo (9 May) mentions the Yellutello commentary, disparagingly. That is the one and only mention of Dante in the five hundred letters of Michelangelo which have been preserved.4
II fI fI 1 This paper was originally read to the Oxford Dante Society on 25 May, 1937. Certain corrections and alterations have been made in it, for which I have to thank: particularly Professors C. Foligno and W. 1,1. Bullock. The following abbreviations are used :G=Cesare Guasti, Le rime di M.B. (Firenze; 1863). F=Carl Frey, Die Dichtungen des M.B. (Berlin; 1897). M=Gaetano Milanesi, Le lettere di M.B., pubblicate coi ricordi ed i contratti artistici (Firew:e;

1875). Preface to the CIaSSJCJJta I'tam . edi'tion 0 f' M.A. s poems (Mi ano; n. d) . .,. '1 II . 3 For Galileo and Dante see N. VaccaIluzzo, Galileo letterato e poeta (Catania; 1896) pp. 92-99 ; M. Barbi, Della fortuna di Dante nel secolo XVI (Pisa; 1890), pp. 142-4, 235. The authenticity of Galileo's two lezioni, read in 1587, is not now in doubt . M. p. 180. The few lines in his letter to Vasari of 28 December, 1556, (M. p. 541) thanking Cosimo Bartoli for a copy of 1,enzoni's " libretto" do not actually mention Dante, and do not indicate any particular interest in it on the part of Michelangelo. Carlo 1,enzoni's In difesa della lingua fioren tina, et di Dante; con Ie regale da far bella et numerosa la prosa was published in Florence in 1556 with a dedication to Cosimo de' Medici and another, by Pierfrancesco Giambullari, to Michelangelo. Lenzoni had wished to dedicate his book to Michelangelo, but died before its completion; whereupon Giani bullarl, who was one of the most prominent Dante scholars of the Florentine Academy, undertook to

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Yet there is no doubt that Michelangelo was well versed in the Divina Commedia, and he may at this .very time have been specially studying it. In the summer of the same year (1545) as he wrote of Vellutello's commentary, he was represented in Giannotti's dialogue as expounding to three of his friends, not indeed the topography of the Inferno, but the somewhat analogous subject of the time sequence of Dante's journey through the Inferno and Purgatory. This dialogue of Donato Giannotti certainly cannot be used as if it were almost a shorthand record of the proceedings of some learned Dante conference, but on the other hand I do not think that it can be brushed aside as a mere literary fantasy, almost without any 'value whatsoever as regards Michelangelo. 5 Giannotti was a friend of Michelangelo, and he brings in as one of the spokesmen in the dialogue a third Florentine, Luigi del Riccio, who was at this period of Michelangelo's life on the very closest terms with him. Although the dialogue form admittedly was a vogue for setting off the writer's learning and style, it would have been very unusual for the times if Giannotti had hailed Michelangelo as " gran Dantista" and had made him expound in great detail technical and complicated argument, in opposition to Landino's commentary, unless Michelangelo were known as being at the least interested in these problems. 6 That he was a "gran Dantista" in the sense of being a great reader and lover of Dante does not depend on the Giannotti dialogue alone. Condivi's life of Michelangelo, which was published in 1553 and must have been written not earlier than 1551, is accepted as being wha t may be called an authorised biography, and is even considered by some scholars (Frey, Paolo d' Ancona) to represent substantially

arrange for its publication, but himself died; and it was left to Bartoli to produce the "libretto." Giambullari in his dedication extols Michelangelo for .' alcune conformita" with Dante, but he writes only of his sculpture, painting and architecture, and does not mention his poetry or his knowledge of Dante. II As does Arturo Farinelli, Michelangelo e Dante (Torino; 1918), pp. 91-2. Farinelli, while allowing that Michelangelo fosse tutto invaso dello spirito di Dante," very justly trounces those critics, in particular Borinski, who go to absurd lengths in discovering the influence of Dante throughout Michelangelo's creations. On the particular point of the Giannotti dialogue, however, I consider that Farinelli overshoots the mark. The dialogue is entitled De' giorni che Dante consumb nel cereare l'Inferno e 'l Purgatorio : strictly speaking it is in the form of two dialogues, but they form one whole. They were not published until 1859, in Florence, "nella tipografia galileiana." Michelangelo dOe! not refer to them. in his letters. Michelangelo is made to hold the view that Dante spent fortyeight hours, and not twentyfour, in Inferno. This view was resurrected and defended by V. Russo in Giornale Dantesco, 1896, vol. iii, pp. 78-9. II The concluding pages (54-64) are on a different subject. Michelangelo is made to express views on tyrannicide and to justify Brutus and Cassius being placed in Lucifer's mouth on the ground that in murdering Caesar they- were traitors to the imperial majesty of Rome and thereby to divine majesty itself. One small pomt may be noticed in the earlier portion of the dialogues: Michelangelo is not represented as conversant with Landino's views on the time taken by Dante on his journey; but this may very well be simply due to the need for stating Landino's views, against which Michelangelo is going to argue, and for maintaining the dialogue form. I may mention here that I do not regard Francisco d'Olanda's dialogues as more than interesting journalism: he does not actually make any reference to Dante. Nor do I attach importance to the anecdote of Michelangelo quarrelling with Leonardo da Vinci over Dante, which rests solely on an anonymous sixteenth century life of Leonardo; lee Archivio storieo italiano, third series, 1873, vol. xvi, p. 226.

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Michelangelo's autobiography.7 Condivi relates of Michelangelo's first stay in Bologna (1494-5), when he was a young man of twenty, that he found a benefactor in Gian Francesco Aldovrandi, with whom he remained a little over a year, and who every evening made him read something from Dante or from Petrarca, or now and then from Boccaccio, until he fell asleep." The severe critic might point out that we are not told whether sleep came quickly, or whether Michelangelo continued reading to himself, or whether indeed both did not drowse off pretty soon. But later we read that Michelangelo in his statues of Active and Contemplative Life H followed Dante of whom he was always a great student" ; and again, writing of Michelangelo's poetry, Condivi states: And as he greatly delighted in the conversation of the learned, so he took pleasure in the study of the writers of both prose and poetry. He had a special admiration for Dante, delighting in the admirable genius of that man, almost all of whose works he knew by heart." (We need not take the last statement literally; at any rate, if we do, Michelangelo was not peculiar in his time; Bronzino was described, and by Varchi, as having all Dante by heart.)8 Condivi immediately goes on to say that he held Petrarca in no less esteem," and that with deep study and attention, he read the Holy Scriptures, both the Old and the New Testaments, and searched them diligently, as also the writings of Savonarola." There we have four sources" for Michelangelo's poetry:-Dante, Petrarch, the Bible, Savonarola: the fifth was Lorenzo de' Medici' s circle and Florentine platonism ; the sixth, and incomparably the most important, was Michelangelo himself. Vasari similarly describes Michelangelo as delighting in the reading of Italian poetry, particularly that of Dante-" il suo famigliarissimo Dante "-, whom he greatly admired and imitated in
H H H H H II

Ascanio Condivi, painter and" disciple," as he describes himself, of Michelangelo, was a young man of about twenty-five when he wrote his life. It is not known when he first met Michelangelo. He left Rome definitively in 1554 after about ten years' stay there. He visited Rome in 1561, when he.saw Michelangelo for the last time. I have used Paolo d'Ancona's edition (Milano; 1928); my quotations are from C. Holroyd's translation in his Michael Angelo Buonarroti (London; 1903). The life does not seem to have been a success, for there was no reprint until 1746. It was probably ousted by Vasari's Lives o/the Painters. In the first edition of this, which was published in 1550, Michelangelo was the only living artist to be included; the life, as would be expected from a pupil and ardent admirer, was extremely laudatory, but Vasari had not entered the service of Julius III in Rome until 1550 and he relied mainly on anecdote and second or third hand knowledge, and for Michelangelo's early years on Paolo Giovio's notice, which itself dated back to about 1512 and was quite unreliable. Vasan sent it to Michelangelo, who thanked him warmly enough, and composed a (rather dull) sonnet in reply (M. 529-30; G; 167; F. 227) ; but it is generally supposed that the mistakes and omissions in Vasarl's life caused Michelangelo to give his own account of his life to Condivi so that what I have called an authorised biography should replace Vasari. In the second edition of the Lives o/the Painters, published in 1568 four years after Michelangelo's death, but six years before Condivi's death, Vasari entirely re-wrote his life of Michelangelo, largely by the simple means of incorporating Condivi unacknowledged. Therefore, except for Michelangelo's last fourteen years when Vasari was in constant and close touch with him, his second version of the life can be used only with caution as an independent authority. 8 Barb!, Della fortuna di Dante ncl secolo XVI, p. 817, citing Opuscoli inediti e rari d'autori toscani (Firenze; 1809), ii, p. 168. That Michelangelo had an extraordinary visual memory is vouched for by Vasari, Opere, ed. G. Milanesi, vol. vii (Firenze; 1881), pp. 277-8.
'1

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his ideas and inventions"; and Vasari, like Condivi, immediately adds Petrarch, and Savonarola.9 However great the dependence of Vasari on Condivi for much of his life of Michelangelo, I do not think it is possible to hold that Vasari, who was so very closely connected with Michelangelo during his last fourteen years, would have simply borrowed from Condivi on this matter unless he felt sure that it was true; and here he may not have been borrowing. Another contemporary, and an acquaintance, of Michelangelo, Benedetto Varchi, the learned light of the Florentine academy and the blender of Plato, Petrarch and Dante, pays ample tribute to Michelangelo's (and no doubt also to his own) knowledge of Dante in his lezione on a sonnet of Michelangelo's delivered before the Academy in 1546.10 The sonnet in question is perhaps the best known of all his sonnets, Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto/Ch'un marmo solo in se non circonscriva/Col suo soverchio,... " and it is very justly described by Varchi as pieno di quella antica purezza e dantesca gravita." He makes frequent references to Petrarch as well, but he is more at pains to emphasise Michelangelo as non solo studioso rna imitatore di Dante," in his poetry as in his sculpture and painting. On Michelangelo's death, Varchi inevitably was foremost among the throng who poured out their valedictory praise of the divine" sculptor, painter and architect, and of the poet, as Varchi says, so deeply versed in Tuscan and above all Dante's poetry. 11 Funeral orations apart, it is accepted that Michelangelo had the reputation, in the later part of his life at least, of knowing well and loving Dante, and also that as an artist he was-frequently both set on a pedestal with Dante and regarded as having drawn upon the Divina Commedia for subjects and inspiration. Vasari hailed the Last Judgement with the line from the Purgatorio (xii, 67) "Morti
It It It H D Vasarl, op. cit., vol. vii pp. 213, 274-5; c/. in one of Vasarl's sonnets to Michelangelo, "Resti immortal fra noi e compagnia' Farai al divin tuo Dante e Petrarca "(F. 274). For Vasarl and CondiVl, see above, n. 7. . 10 It was first printed in 1549. It is reprinted in G. In the original edition there was included Varchi's second lezione on sculpture and painting, together with Michelangelo's typically downright letter in reply on the alleged superiority of painting over sculpture. This letter appears in M., pp. 522-3. In M., p. 524, is another well-known letter of Michelangelo expressing great satisfaction at the honour done him by Varcbi reading and commenting on his sonnet: 11 sonnetto vien bene da me, mn il comento viene dal Cielo." In F. 369-371, on the relations of Varchi and Michelangelo, this is considered to be a two-edged compliment. . 11 Benedetto Varcbi, Orazione /unerale latta e recitata da lui pubblicamente nell' essequie di M.B. (Firenze; 1564), pp. 14 and 40. The funeral honours were paid to Michelangelo above all as a sculptor, painter, and architect, and neither of the two contemporary monuments to him, in Santa Croce and in S8. Apostoli in Rome, add" poeta" in the inscriptions. But others, besides Varchi, paid secondary tribute to him as a poet; and Vasari, who was in charge of the extremely elaborate funeral in San Lorenzo, saw to it that Giovanmaria Buteri painted Michelangelo in the act of composing poetry with the assistance of the Muses and Apollo, and that another of Bronzino's pupils, Alessandro Allon, should include in his painting of Michelangelo being received by the galaxy of dead artists the famous Une" Tutti 10 miran, tutU onor gli fanna" (Inferno, iv. 133) ; Vasarl, op. cit. vol. vii, pp. 303, 305, 307.

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Ii morti, e i vivi parean vivi."12 Later generations have set busily to work on both living and dead. The generation before the war poured out (chiefly from Germany) a spate of learning and ingenuity on Michelangelo and Dante, from the aberrations of which Italian scholars, in particular, have now rescued us and given us again Michelangelo as first and foremost Michelangelo. When Borinski expounds to us the eighty-six references to the Divona Commedia which he finds in Michelangelo's paintings, drawings and sculpture; when Steinmann and Kallab assure us that in the Last Judgement alone there are twentyseven such references (half of which escaped Borinski) ; when Thode refutes or leaves doubtful all but a bare half-dozen of them; when Scheffler discovers that the only way to understand the Sistine Chapel vault is to read, not Dante, but Plato; when Holroyd shews us Dante in the Last Judgement thirsting for deepest mysteries, his face positively thrust between St. Peter and St. Paul," and Steinmann shews us Dante in an opposite comer of the same fresco with Vergil bending over him and proceeds to note with devastating relevance that this group is almost unrecognizably destroyed in the original; when clever and learned men behave thus, we can almost wish that Michelangelo had never heard of Dante.13 From Michelangelo's own lifetime onwards, all that is agreed (and even so with {:ertain reservations) is: that the figures of Charon and Minos in the Last Judgement are suggested by the description of them in the Inferno; that the two statues in San Pietro in Vincoli representing Active and Contemplative Life (together with Moses the only completed figures of the tomb of Julius II) are suggested by Leah and Rachel in Purgatorio xxvii; and that a design of a Pieta made for Vittoria Colonna (now known only in copies) contains on the cross the line from the Paradiso (xxix, 91) Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa,"14 The much repeated story of a copy of Landino's comH H

u Vasari, op. cit. vol. vii, p. 212. 13 K. Borinski, Die Ratsel Michelangelos : Michelangelo und Dante (Munich: 1908) (of the eightysix passages, he finds forty-three in the Sistine Chapel vault (especially in the lunettes), fifteen in the lAst Jf~dgement, none in the Capella Paolino.] : E. Steimnann, Die Sixtinische Kapelle (Munich; 1905) vol. ii, pp. 569-86 ; W. Kallab, Die Deutung von Michelangelo's Jiingsten Gericht," in Beitrage zur Kunstgeschichte, Franz Wickhoff gewidmet (Vienna; 1903) [I have not myself seen this article and am. dependent on Thode's and Farinelli's criticisms of it]. H. Thode, Michelangelo: Kritische Untersuchungen ilber seine Werke (Berlin; 1908), vol. ii, pp. 41-6 (he argues in great detail (pp. 24-39) for the immediate inspiration of the Last Judgement by the BIble, especially the Old Testament] ; L. Scheffler, Michelangelo (Altenburg; 1892), pp. 207-18; Holroyd, Michael Angelo Buonarroti, p. 220; Steinmann, op. cit., p .. 583. For a criticism of Borinski's views in particular, se eFarinelli, Miche langelo e Dante, passim. 14 Even in regard to Charon and Minos, it is as well to remember that Michelangelo is far from reproducing Dante's descriptions of them and that they should be compared with Signorelli's representations. For the Pieta see particularly Thode, op. cit. 4926 ; and for a photograph of the print by Bonasone dated 1546, his Michelangelo und das Ende der Renaissance (Berlin; 1912), vol. iii, p. 685. In Thode's same work, vol. iii, pp. 288-92, he discusses (with reproductions) the statues of Leah and Rachel-Active and Contemplative Life. These again seem to me to be very far from Dante, and I wonder whether, if we had not been told by Condivi and Vasari whom they represented, we should bave connected them with Dante's Leah and Rachel.

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mentary illustrated by Michelangelo which was lost in a shipwreck off the Tuscan coast cannot be traced back behind the eighteenth century; and the story of another copy of Dante with Michelangelo illustrations likewise lost in a shipwreck, but this time in the Baltic, is even less likely to be true.15 In sharpest contrast with Botticelli and Signorelli, Michelangelo had nothing of the illustrator in him. One undisputed fact must be added, -his offer to design the tomb of Dante in the 1518 petition for the removal of Dante's ashes from Ravenna to Florence, in which petition he alone wrote in Italian.16 If the definite connections with Dante in Michelangelo's painting and sculpture are so meagre or so dubious, what of the connections of his poetry? Dante appears directly in three only of Michelangelo's poems. He wrote two sonnets to Dante (both almost certainly dated 1545: G. 153-5; F. 144, 156), and he wrote one sonnet Against the men of Pistoia " (dated by Frey as probably between 1534 and 1537 : G. 160; F. 57), in which he mentions il Poeta."17 Both the sonnets to Dante are stamped with Michelangelo's insistence on Dante as a great moral teacher, and the first one (carefully worked over as are most of Michelangelo's poems) is a fine example of compressed strength and subtlety of thought and feeling, with (possibly deliberate) echoes from the Divina Commedia in el nido, ove naqqu' io," and quel popolo ingrato." 18 All else in Michelangelo's poetry is on a different footing. I do not mean that that is the end of the relation between Dante and Michelangelo; rather is it the beginning. But
II H II II III For the story of the second lost copy of Dante see E. Steinmann, Die Sixtiniscke Kapelle, vol. ii, p. 567 n. For the first lost copy the only authority appears to be Giovanni Gaetano Bottari (16891775); philologist, antiquarian, art critic, member of the Crusca), who speaks of it having belonged to Antonio Montauti (d. about 1740; Florentine sculptor, medallist and architect) and having been lost in a shipwreck together with its owner when he was moving his valuables to Rome; d. Giovanni Battista Audiffredi, Specimen historico-criticum editionum italicarum saeculi XV (Roma; 1794), p. 288 n., and I,eopoldo Cicognara, Storia della scultura dal suo risorgimetlto in Italia fino al secolo di Canova (Prato; 1824: second revised and enlarged edition), vol. v., p. 162. 16 The text of the" supplica,OJ together with the signatures, is printed in A. Gotti, Vita di M.B. (Firenze; 1875), vol. ii, pp. 82-4. 17 The Plstoia sonnet has in it much of Dante's scathing power of invective, though it take$ nothing direct from Dante's meeting with Vanni Fucci and denunciation of Pistoia (Inferno, xxiv, 122xxv, 16). M.A.'s line" insidiosi superbi al ciel nemici OJ recalls something of Inferno, xxv, 14, non vidi spirto (Vanni Fucci) in Dio tanto superbo ; "insidiosi OJperhaps in allusion to Vanni Fucci, in the bolgia of the thieves, whose first crime was the robbery of the sacristy of St. James. A recent writer has identified as Vanni Fucci one of the figures in the Sistine Chapel fresco of the brazen serpent, a group which many other critics have related to Dante's t'ena di ladri in Inferno, xxiv : Bruno Bruni in Giornale Dantesco, 1923, vol. xxvi, p. 288; also Borinski, Die Ratsel Michelangelos, pp. 232-3. 18 Inferno, xv, 78, ii nido di malizia tanta OJ(Florence) ; Inferno, xx, 56, la dove nacqu' io OJ ; IKferno, xv, 61, quell' ingrato popol0 maligno OJ (the Florentines). But, as Fortunato Rizzi, Mickelangelo poeta (Milano; 1924), p. 221, very fairly mentions, nido used of one's country or early home occurs both in Petrarch and in Lorenzo the Magnificent. Verbal similarities between Michelangelo and Dante are frequent enough, but those between Michelangelo and Petrarch are on the whole equally frequent (more so in the earlier poems, less so in the later), and the similarities between Michelangelo and both are almost as frequent. A good example of the dangers in the path of the Dante enthusiast, who is not also steeped in Petrarch or Lorenzo the Magnificent and his circle, is supplied by Michelangelo's curious unfinished stanza on a giant and "una gran vechia, pigra e lenta a seco OJ Un gigante (" v'e ancor d'alteza tanta" F. 58-9) : this would strike most readers as recalling Dante, and perhaps particularl>", as in F. p. 347, the wolf in the first canto of the Inferno: this may be the intended evocation, or ongin; but Frey on second thoughts quotes very pertinent lines from Lorenzo (p. 547) which can well take a share in the" origin OJ the stanza. of .

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there has been so much indiscriminate writing on this subject that I have thought it as well to begin by emphasising that in all ranges of Michelangelos art. and not least in his poetry. the direct evidence of its relation with Dante is very small.19 Michelangelo has left over three hundred poems, including fragments. All are short; and the core consists of some eighty finished sonnets, some ninety madrigals, and half-a-dozen canzoni. Hardly any of his poetry was published in his lifetime: three of his madrigals were set to music and published. and are referred to as being widely sung ; four sonnets and three madrigals (besides odd lines from other poems) were published by Varchi. during his lifetime.20 Two more sonnets were published in 1565, the year after his death, in Atanagi's Rime di diversi nobili poeti toscani; and Vasari included in his life two sonnets and the quatrain on Night. Michelangelo himself in 1545-6 was preparing to publish an edition of his poems. with Luigi del Riccio and Donato Giannotti. but on the deaths of Riccio in October 1546 and of Vittoria Colonna in February 1547 he abandoned the task; and Condivi never fulfilled his hope of bringing out some of Michelangelos sonnets and madrigals, which I have for a long time collected, both from himself and from others . . :. (Holroyd. p. 93). Thus. apart from private circulation among Michelangelos circle and the literary lights of his day. scarcely any of his poetry was actually known until his great-nephew published the first edition of his poems in 1623. . Michelangelo the younger substantially treated the poems as Daniele da Volterra had. under orders. draped the nudities of the Last Judgement. The edition was far from complete; the greatest liberties were taken with the text ; and the poems addressed, or apparently addressed, to Tommaso Cavalieri were bowdlerized. There were reprints of and translations from this edition. but for over two hundred years it remained to give a highly misleading idea of Michelangelo's poetry. No new edition appeared until Guasti's in 1863, which entirely transformed the position of Michelangelo as a poet. Guasti went to the manuscripts, published almost the whole and produced a text together with variant readings (very numerous for most of the poems). He did not. however. attempt a chronological order. and his methods in dealing with handwriting and various other questions were not satisfactory. It was left to Frey, in 1897. to supplement Guasti by his voluminous and intricate edition of text and notes,
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19 One of the worst examples of such indiscriminate comparisons is Ettore l"ngelo e Dante (Firenze; 1875). 90 see Rizzi, Mlc1lelangelo poeta, pp. 29-30; and F. pp. vi, 427, 43g.

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in which all variants and corrections are reproduced and each poem is as far as possible dated. The great bulk of the poems that we now possess belong to the last thirty years of Michelangelo's life, when he was over sixty. The earliest that can be approximately dated go back to about 1505. It is certain that Michelangelo wrote a considerable amount of poetry, especially in his earlier years, which has been lost and even destroyed by the poet himself.21 Of the poems that remain the overwhelming majority are on one subject-love; and on one person-Michelangelo. They are the intensely personal, tight-packed communings of a man writing (with rare exceptions) for himself, struggling for expression that might satisfy him (and it rarely did). As Condivi artlessly remarked, the heavens and Michelangelo's nature were both difficult to understand. His poetry reveals, as none of his greater works of art do, something of the inner development of the man-fleeting, flashing glimpses during the triumphant years of the Pisa cartoon and the frescoes of the Sistine chapel, during the tragic waste of the Julius II tomb and the San Lorenzo fa<;ade,during the mysterious struggles of the siege of Florence and the tombs of the Medici; steadier, fuller views while he surged through the Last Judgement, the Crucifixion of St Peter and the Conversion of St Paul to deliver himself at the last to the contrition of the sinner seeking the mercy of Christ in the crowning dome of St. Peter's and the entombment in Sta Maria del Fiore, yet knowing finally
Ne pinger ne scolpir fie piu ehe quieti L' anim a, volto a quell' amor divino, Ch' aperse, a prender noi, ,n croce Ie braccia. (G. 230; F. 236.)

Michelangelo's poetry is currently taken as the most individual and exceptional example of cinquecento lyrical poetry. At its highest it attains (but rarely maintains) that veemenza domata so characteristic of his other artistic creations ; it is marked repeatedly by that " aseiutta nudita which stamps his letters; to many it has suggested
If H

1I1 See the references in F., pp. xiv-xv: but the statement that M.A.'s'letter in M., p. 270, specifically mentions his having been robbed of his own poems as well as Vittoria Colonna's is incorrect: M.A. simply says moUe cose." As regards the early poetry of M.A. the following passage in Condivi should be noted: It was some time since he had worked at that art (Le. painting: Condivi has just mentioned the round panel of Our Lady, now in the Uffizi] having given himself up to the study of poets, and authors in the vulgar tongue and writing sonnets for his own pleasure .. ." (Holroyd, op. cit., p. 29). This immersion in poetry seems to have occurred shortly before 1504, which date is mentioned in the continuation of the passage.

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comparison with Dante per violenta potenza di creazione aspra e forte. "22 In this it is sharply distinct from the main trends of sixteenth century poetry. Michelangelo had grown up in Florence at the close of the enthusiastic Dante cult under Lorenzo de' Medici, when the studio boasted a chair for the study of the Commedia and when Plato and Plotinus were being fused with the Christian revelation and Dante's synthesis of Christian teaching. In 1472 the first printed edition of the Commedia had appeared; in the next twenty years thirteen others were published, among them, in 1481, in Florence itself, Landino's text and famous commentary, which immediately established itself as the indispensable guide to Dante's encyclopredia. In the cinquecento Dante was rivalled by Petrarch, even though the generally held opinion as to Dante's decline in favour is open to doubt. If the printing press is some guide to popularity, the Canzoniere, with one hundred and sixty-seven editions in the sixteenth century, looks boastful by the side of the Commedia with its fifty-two.23 At any rate the einquecento left one notable mark on Dante: it gave the very name Divina Commedia.24 This was by far the best known of Dante's works, and the question of the influence of Dante upon Michelangelo and comparisons between the two relate almost entirely to the Divina Commedia. There is, however, no influence of terza rima. With the popularity of Petrarch went the popularity of ottava rima; though it must be allowed that the use of terza rima in the sixteenth century was much more widespread than has sometimes been suggested.25 Michelangelo's predilection was for the sonnet form and for the madrigal, which latter he transformed from its predominantly idyllic tone into a vehicle for passionate outburst or severe meditation, with
U 22

T. Parodi, Michelangelo Buonarroti,"

in his Poesia e letteratura (Bari ; 1916), pp. 167, 176,

184. Barbi, op. cit., p. 3; G. Mambelli, Gli annali delle edizioni dantesche, (Bologna; 1931) gives fifty-two editions of the Divina Commedia printed in the sixteenth century, of which five were printed in Lyons, and the remainder in Italy. 24 The Giolito 1555 edition was the first to use the title, and it was followed by the great Crusca edition of 1595. It may be convenient to mention here the editions printed during Michelangelo's lifetime of Dante's other works, according to Mambelli. The Convivio was first printed in 1490, in Florence; there were three other editions. The Monarchia was first printed, in Latin, in Basle, in 1559, and a German translation appeared in the same year: it was promptly put on the Index. The Quaestio de aqua et terra was re-discovered and printed in 1508. The only one of the letters known was the tenth, to Henry VII, which was printed in 1547, and again in 1552. The Credo and Salmi penitenziali, which were then usually attributed to Dante, were printed in 1477, and five other times III the fifteenth century, but not at all in the sixteenth. Some touches in Michelangelo's later religious poems are reminiscent of the Salmi, but there is no reason why they should not derive from the Psalms themselves. The Rime (except those in the Vita "uova) were first printed in 1518; there were four other editions, of varying content. The Vita nuova, which according to Barbi, op. cit., pp. 92-3, was very little known in the sixteenth century, was not even printed until 1576. The Eclogues did not appear until 1719. The De Vulgari Eloquentiae, which was held by many not to be by Dante, was not printed in the Latin until 1577, though Trissino's Italian verSion had appeared in 1529. 25 e.g. by Barbi, op. cit., pp. 290-316, who is, however, concerned primaril,Y not simply with terza rima, but with cinquecento poets showing connections with Dante and writing In terza rima.
23

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the loosest metrical structure.26 Terza rima he uses only in five capitoli; one of them naturally Bemesque in style, since it was in reply to Berni himself; another on the death of his father and brother, Buonarroto, Petrarchan rather than Dantesque. (Ugo Foscolo in his spirited article on Michelangelo's poetry says that he borrowed from Dante terza rima for this poem; but must all terza rima be directly borrowed from Dante ?)27 Neither the Vita nuova nor the Convivio can be said to have directly influenced Michelangelo's poetry. There are echoes of them, though perhaps even these are re-echoes through Petrarch and Lorenzo de' Medici, or through Ficino and Benivieni. It is true that the dominating idea of the dolce stil nuovo, "Amore e '1 cor gentil sono una cosa," occurs from time to time in Michelangelo's sonnets (G. 72, 33, 225; F. 50, 163, 201, 203), but it is not developed into an essential element in his thought and feeling, and the idea itself had become part of the literary stock-in-trade of the quattrocento.28 Beatrice and Vittoria Colonna have nothing in common, either in themselves or in the life histories of Dante and Michelangelo. If there be any parallel in Dante's life to the Bolognese,whose " schietta cintura, che s'annoda, / mi par dir seco: qui vo' stringier sempre. / Or che farebbor dunche Ie mie braccia ?" (G. 178; F. 6) ; there is surely none to the woman di fuor pietosa e nel cor aspra e fera " (G: 54; F. 175), who more than thirty years later in the midst of his friendship with Vittoria Colonna wrung from him the cry, " Se dolce mi sara / l'infemo teco, in ciel dunche che fora? " (G. 71 ; F. 161). And at a yet further extreme there is the platonic love" of male beauty and Michelangelo's relations with Cecchino Bracci and Tommaso Cavalieri, which, if they disturb and puzzle our own day, would, I conceive, quite frankly have revolted Dante.29 The distinctive contributions of Dante to the dolce stil nouvo were his fusing of the literary motives and conceits of his day with a profoundly experienced reality into a poetic whole, and his escape from the pains of love and from its sensual origin to the spiritual adoration of the beloved, achieved in part in the later Rime, and
II
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G. G. Ferrero, Il petrarchismo del Bemho e Ie rime di Michelangelo, (Torino; 1935) pp. 59-60. The Retrospective Review (I.ondon; 1826) vol. xiii, p. 263. Ferrero, op. cit., p. 92-3. 119 J. A. Symonds's essay on "The Dantesque and Platonic ideals of I.ove," in his In the key of blue (I.ondon; 1893), though it does not touch on Michelangelo, is well worth reading in this connection. Srmonds himself was profoundly disturbed by the new evidence as to Michelangelo's loves and friendships revealed in Guasti's and Milanesi's editions of the poems and letters, and manipulated by Lombroso and others; this is shewn in his discussion of them in the second volume of his Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (I.ondon; 1893), vol. ii, chap. xii, and pp. 381-5.
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wholly, through its absorption in divine love, in the Divina Commedia.30 There is a certain general similarity here with Michelangelo's relation to the lyrical poetry of his age. That age brought the love of women and of external beauty into the centre of its poetry : it continued with its inheritance, above all through Petrarch, of intel1ectualised subtleties of emotional feeling; among the Tuscans it added the ideas drawn from Platonic and Neoplatonic sources, which in large part were readily assimilable to the prevailing motives of the love poetry of the trecento and the earlier quattrocento. In all this, Michelangelo was the child of his age which is refracted throughout his poetry, somewhat as Dante in his earlier years used the forms of thought and expression of the dolce stil nuovo without specific novelty of content. But in much at least of Michelangelo's poetry it is refracted rather than reflected: there is little in it of the insipidity and conventional playing with ideas which characterizes much of the lyrical output of the cinquecento. Michelangelo could not have written as he did without Petrarch, and without Poliziano, Lorenzo il Magnifico, and Boiardo.31 But he was Michelangelo, a man far out of the ordinary; if he wrote of what many others wrote of, in sonnets and madrigals as they did, the result was not ordinary. As with Dante, profoundly experienced reality gives a new quality to current themes or accepted modes. Berni, comparing Michelangelo (the " nuovo Apollo e nuovo Apel1e ") with the petrarchizing poets of his days, summed up once for all with the line: Ei dice cose, e voi dite parole:' On the other hand Michelangelo did not, as Dante, weld the old and new into a poetic whole. With rare exceptions, his dark soliloquies and communings of conscience failed to achieve in poetic form that unity and coherence which gives the stamp of mastery ; taken as a whole his poems project themselves as " capolavori a mezzo," solo conati"; as if they were u un lavorio che mai giunge a finitezza."32 Nor did Michelangelo, as Dante, resolve the heart searchings and laments of love at long last in a beatific and all-comprehensive vision. The steadfast, assured pride and piety of Vittoria Colonna could not tame the restless fires of the old man for whom still (c. 1547)'u La
H

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so See F. Figurelli, 11 dolce ~til nuevo (Napoli; 1933), particularly pp. 41923. For the influence of Petrarch and of the less aristocratic styles of Poliziano, Lorenzo, and Boiardo, see Ferrero, op. cit., particularly pp. 67, 83-8, 93; and c/. Arturo Insinga, Michelangelo poeta (Palermo; 1919), pp. 19,3945. Insinga's insistence on Michelangelo's indebtedness to the last three and in particular also to Aretino ra\her than to Petrarch is exaggerated and unconvincing. 311 Vladimiro Zabughin, Storia del rinascimento cristiano in Italia (Milano; 1924), p. 357; T. Parodi, Michelangelo Buonarroti," in his posthumously published Poes:a e letteratura (Earl; 1916), pp. 185, 188: this interesting essay is mainly confined to Michelangelo's poems and letters, but Parodi is careful to insist that Michelangelo can be understood only by a study of all the fields in which he worked and revealed himself.
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nuova belta d'una I mi sprona, sfrena e sferza" (G. 136; F. 219). Only with death would he be freed from himself: "0 donna, che passate I per aqqua e foco l'alme a lieti giorni, I deh fate ch'a me stessi phi non torni " (G. 94; F. 229) ; " La nostra eterna quiete I fuor d'ogni tempo e priva I d'invidia amando e d'angosciosi pianti " (G. 40 ; F. 142).33 Michelangelo's numerous designs of the Crucifixion and the Pieta between 1544 and 1556 bear the same witness as some of his noblest poems of these same years to his quest for redemption and peace; but the feeling is of one flinging himself at the foot of the cross, Carico d'anni e di peccati pieno I e col trist' uso radicato e forte" (G. 238; F. 242), and is at the furthest extreme from Piccarda's sublimity of love-" E' n la sua voluntate e nostra pace." Ochino's preaching may possibly have revived Michelangelo's memories of Savonarolaand have thereby contributed something-to the Christ the avenger in the Last Judgement, from whom even Mary half turns away, and to the religious intensity burning in many of Michelangelo's later poems; but neither Gchino nor Savonarola, nor Vittoria Colonna, nor the Bible, could give to him more than an occasional glimpse of that radiancy of Paradise which Beatrice gave to Dante.34 If religious influencesfailed to bring to Michelangelothe harmonising of the" fiero braccio" and" pungenti strali" (G. 343; F.209) with that splendour which " dalle piu alte stelle I discende. . e qui si chiama amore" (G. 33; F. 201), still less could the platonist conceptions of love which Michelangelo as a young man found ruling the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Florentine neoplatonism is
41 33 Rizzi in his selected poems of Michelangelo (Michelangelo poeta, p. 244) compares these lines with Paradiso, iii, 70-90, and Purgatorio, xv, 49-57, 67-75. The comparison with the first and third of these passages seems to me very far-fetched. 34 As far as I know there is no evidence that Michelangelo actually met or heard Ochino. Vittoria Colonna first knew Ochino in 1533 or 1534, at about the same time as she first met Michelangelo. Michelangelo was working on the Last Judgement from 1534 to 1541. Ochino was finally suspended, and fled to Switzerland, in 1542. There is no ground at all for thinking that Michelangelo through Vittoria Colonna's circle imbibed any heretical ideas: A. Morpurgo, Vittoria Colonna: cenni storici e lelterari (Trieste; 1888), has some very sensible pages (47-51) on her orthodoxy, though his chapter on Michelangelo is worth very little. Karl Frey in his Michelagniolo Buonarroti: Quellen und Forschungen zu seiner Geschichte und Kunst (Berlin; 1907), vol. i, pp. 11118, strongly attacks exaggerated views, particularly those of Thode, on the importance of Savonarola's influence on Michelangelo, who certainly was not a piagnone. Frey does admit, however, that Savonarola later became to Michelangelo" a kind of political symbol and martyr." Thode's pages on Savonarola in his Michelangelo und das Ende der Renaissance, (Berlin; 1903), vol. ii, pp. 293-320, are worth reading, even though the connections with Michelangelo's religious views rest on such little evidence: one keynote of Savonarola's sermons "Nos predicamus Christum crucifixum " is to some extent parelleled, even if it is not re-echoed, in the last twenty years of Michelangelo's life, when the austerity of the Counter-Reformation was in the ascendant in Rome. For the connections of Savonarola with Ficino and his followers Pico della Mirandola, Diacceto, and Benivieni, and the attempts to christianise Humanism and the love of man through the intermediacy of platonism, see I,uigi Tonelli, L' amore nella poesia e nel pensiero del Rinascimento (Firenze; 1933), particularly pp. 256-76, 307-9. For a full and scholarly analysis of Ficino's philosophy see G. Saitta, La filosofia di M arsilio Ficino (Messina; 1923). Pico was a piagnone, and Benivieni, "cominciO come poeta popolareggiante, continuO come poeta ficiniano, terminO come laudese savonaroliano." Benivieni (1453-1542) was also a leading Dante scholar, and a friend of Donato Giannotti. In company with Michelangelo he signed the petition for the transference of Dante's ashes to Florence, but I can find no evidence as to his acquaintance with Michelangelo ill Caterina Re's very thorough study, Girolamo Benivieni (Cittl).di Castello; 1906).

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the most conspicuous component of the philosophical thought of Michelangelo's poetry. Philosophy was in general for Ficino una somiglianza e una felicissima imitazione di Dio, una salita dalle cose inferiori aIle superiori, dalle tenebre alla luce."35 It was from Ficino especially that Michelangelo drew his neoplatonism, probably not directly but through Pico, Benivieni and Diacceto, and it is in the sense just quoted that his poetry has a philosophic content. A recent English writer has described a fragment of Michelangelo as the text and epitome" of his neoplatonism: "Non posso or non veder dentro a chi muore I tuo Iuce eterna senza gran disio" (F. 20).36 The goal of his neoplatonism might perhaps be summed up from St. Thomas's great exposition of creation and emanation, matter and form, in Paradiso, xiii, 52-5; Cia che non more, e cio che puo morire. / non e se non splendor di quella idea I che partorisce. amando, il nostro Sire;. " That goal Michelangelo, unlike Dante, never securely reached. For him love was in the main the idealisation of one special passion; it was only rarely what it became for Dante " the universal and innate force or tendency that impels every creature to pursue the inmost trend of its being, to the goal divinely ordained; the cause for which every agent does its every action."37 The cinquecento like the quattrocento emphasised above all love in the form of the beauty of sensible objects, more especially the beauty of the human form, and this last was without any doubt the central impulsion of Michelangelo's creative genius.. The neoplatonist currents aided greatly the attempt to sublimate the love of terrestial
II II II 35 Saitta, op. cit., p. 24. 36 N. A. Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London; 1935), p. 248. She does not examine closely (p. 241) the question of the exact sources of Michelangelo's neoplatonism, a question which in part turns on whether Michelangelo read I,atin with any currency. (There is no suggestion that he knew Greek). Ficino translated Plato's Symposium into I,atin in 1474-5, and into Italian in 1475, but the latter translation was not published until 1544. I,andino's commentary on the Com media could have supplied Michelangelo with some connections between Plato and Dante. There is a useful summary of the question of Michelangelo's neoplatonic sources in Ferrero, op. cit., pp. 62-5; and a very exaggerated comparison between Michelangelo's poems and the Symposium and the Phaedrus in I,. Scheffler, Michelangelo, pp. 84-111. Frey, M ichelagniolo Buonarroti: QueUen und Forschungen zu seiner Geschichte tmd Kunst (Berlin; 1907), vol. i, pp. 16-17, argues strongly against Michelangelo's knowing anything but the elementary rudiments of Church I,atin. The statement put into Michelangelo's mouth in the Giannotti dialogue (1859 ed., p. 30) that he must really sit down and learn I,atin now that he was seventy should not in my opinion be taken over-seriously. It should be noted that Michelangelo in his contracts, as printed in M., relies on Italian rather than I,atin. For instance, the second and third contracts for the tomb of Julius II are in I,atin, but with translations added in the hand of M.A. The second contract has an addendum in Italian in the hand of M.A. ; and the third contract contains in the middle a description of the model in Italian, in the hand of M.A. The 1532 contract is also in I,atin : it has a note at the end in Italian in the hand of I,uigi del Riccio, and a translation added (Milanesi does not mention the handwriting). It is of this contract that M.A. wrote ten years later that he had not understood it when read out before Pope Clement VII as he had not a copy with him (M., p. 489). He does not explicitly sayan Italian copy; but that is usually taken as his meaning. The final contract (1542) for the tomb is in Italian, save for the formal beginning and ending. 37 E. G. Gardner, Dante and the mystics (London; 1913), p. 21. M.A. could find in Dante much to fortify his neoplatonism, but it certainly was not directly derived from Dante, with the possible exception of the idea that the souls of men descend from the stars to inhabit mortal bodies and on their death re-ascend to their respective stars. (Convivio, ii, 14,1. 26; iv, 21, 11.17-19, and Paradiso, iv, 22-4, 49-60, combating Plato's view.) For Dante and Plato see especially E. Moore, Studies iff Dante: first series (Oxford; 1896), pp. 156-64.

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beauty by recourse to the identification of love with God, in the sense that beauty is the ray of God " infusing all creation, whereby man in particular is drawn, even though unconsciously, to seek the highest: quel fulgore della divinita, che risplende nel corpo bello, constringe in amanti a maravigliarsi, temere e venerare detta persona come una statua di Dio.u3B One of the most characteristic features in Michelangelo's poetry is his striving for an eternal beauty denied him in anyone of its manifestations here below: every manifestation of beauty on earth is indeed a sign of divine power, but it is also but a reflexion of divine beauty. It is not possible to attempt to analyse here platonic love as it appears in Michelangelo's poems; three quatrains may be sufficient to sum up his approach and thought : Veggio nel bel viso, Signior mio, I quel che narra mal puossi in questa vita. I L'anima, della carne ancor vestita, I con esso e gia piu volte asciesa a Dio." (G. 216; F. 53). Colui, che 'I tutto fe, fece ogni parte I e poi del tutto la piu bella scelse, I per mostrar quivi Ie sue cose eccelse, I com' ha fatto or, con la sua divin' arte." (G. 280; F. 4). Amor, la tua belta non e mortale; I nessun volto fra noi e, che pareggi Il'immagine del cor ch' infiammi e reggi I con altro foco, e muovi con altr' ale." (G. 280; F. 51). General connections between Michelangelo's and Dante's ideas of spiritual beauty are easy to find and there are some parallels in details, though I think very rarely without at the same time being parallels with Petrarch or quattrocento poets. Much more important to my mind is the difference between Michelangelo and Dante, a difference which I have underlined in touching on Michelangelo's religious poems. Platonic love, in all but a very few of his poems (e.g. Non vider gli occhi miei cosa mortale" (G. 214; F. 83) ; "Gli occm miei vaghi delle cose belle" (G. 33 ; F. 201), does not bring that serene transcendance nella forma universale" which it was its professed object to attain. Michelangelo remained with Ie fallaci speranze e 'I van desio, I piangendo, amando, ardendo, e sospirando" (G. 348 ; F. 37).39 In one of his finest and most carefully elaborated sonnets to Cavalieri he exclaims:
II If II II II If II II

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Quel ch' i' sento e ch' i' cerco, e chi mi guidi, meco non e; .ne so ben veder, dove trovar mel possa, e par ch' altri mel mostri. Questo, Signior, m'avvien', po' ch' i' vi vidi, c'un dolc' e amaro, ur.. sl e no mi muove ...
88

" (G. 199; F. 79.)

Fieino, Sopra 10 Amore 0 Vel' convito di Platone (1593 ed.), p. 37, quoted by Rizzi, op. cit., p. 91, with reference to M.A.'s sonnet" Veggio nel tuo bel viso, Signor mio." 311 The original of this tanzone is on the back of a drawing (Robinson, 45) in the AshtIloiean Museum.

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To the end beauty brought him not the angelic and serene countenance, but arrows of fire and bewilderment.4o
Passar per gli occhi al core in un momento qualunque obbietto di beltc\ lor sia e per sl larga e sl capace via, ch' a mille non si chiude, non ch' a cento, d'ogni eta, d'ogni sesso : ond' io pavento, carco d'affanni e piu di gelosia, ne fra si vari volti so qual sia ch' anzi morte mi dia 'ntero contento." (G. 221 ; F. 224.)

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Michelangelo as seen through his poetry is the reverse of Dante. The one confronts us now a guisa di leon quando si posa " (Purgatorio, vi, 66), now" puro e disposto a salire aIle stelle" (Purgatorio, xxxiii, 145); the other struggles in perpetual disharmony: "nemico di me stesso, I inutilmente i pianti e sospir verso" (G. 347 ; F. 37).41 Taken as a whole, Michelangelo's work is as markedly in contrast with Dante's in the lonely nakedness of its power. If Michelangelo be styled the artist of omnipotence as revealed in the greatness of man, Dante may be styled the artist both of omnipotence and of wisdom and love. With Michelangelo landscape scarcely appears: man is disjoined as it were from the world we know; Titanic figures dwell withdrawn into themselves. In Dante there is no such divorce.42 Walter Pater in a well known passage has written: "in Michelangelo's poems, frost and fire are almost the only images-the refining fire of the goldsmith; once or twice the phrenix; ice melting at the fire ; fire struck from the rock which it afterwards consumes. Except one doubtful allusion to a journey, there are almost no incidents. "43 This is a little overdrawn, but undoubtedly the range of notes and the range of vision in his poetry is constricted. In laying stress on the divergences and contrasts between Dante
II 40 The group of poems to a woman" di fuor pietosa e nel cor aspro e fera," which are usually dated in the mid-fifteen-forties and are therefore contemporary with the later Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna poems, are a good example of his" poesia amorosa realistica," to use the expression of Vincenzo Pascale. His Michelangelo Buonarroti Poeta (Napoli; 1902) is, I think, right in its insistence on the autobiographical realism in much of Michelangelo's love poetry, though it is misleading on platonic love and is a very uneven book. 41. Farinelli, Michelangelo e Dante, has some good pages (117-18, 127-9) on this contrast between the two, though they are somewhat overcoloured. See also Tonelli, op. cit., p. 106. In my opinion the reaction against the Romain Rolland portrait of Michelangelo has gone too far; Farinelli restores the balance. The comparison between Michelangelo's internal conflict and the conflicting elements of his times has very naturally been made by many writers: e.g. Rizzi, op. cit., p. 24 ; Robb, op. cit., pp. 243-4; Julian Klaczko, "Causeries florentines: Dante et Michel Ange," in Revue des deu:t& mondes, 1880, vol. ~, p. 250. 411 Giovanni Franciosi, " Quanto v'abbia di vera nell' antico paragone fra Michelangelo e Dante," in Giornale ligustico d'archeologia, storia e belle arti, (Genova; 1876), vol. iii, pp. 15660. The answer to thet itle is : not much. The article does not deal with Michelangelo's poetry. "s The poetry of Michelangelo" in The Renaissance (191000.), p. 87. Attempts such as those of Pascale, op. cit., pp. 63-8, to maintain that Michelangelo's feeling for nature grew very greatly with advancing years, as shewn by his "idyllic poetry," cannot be sustained even despite the very late (1556) In lode della vita f'usticale (G. 317 ; F. 249). What should be remembered, however, is that we do not possess Michelangelo's early poetry.

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and Michelangelo, I have not, I hope, implied disparagement of Michelangelo as a great creative artist. Ever since his lifetime comparisons between the two and statements as to Dante's influence on him have constantly been made; usually to small purpose. The admirable selection of Michelangelo's poetry by Fortunato Rizzi (Milano; 1924) provides a good example of some of the difficulties I have in mind. Rizzi gives in his notes parallel passages from Dante (almost all of them from the Divina Coinmedia) : some are purely linguistic or grammatical comparisons; some are comparisons with the idea expressed or image used; sometimes it is a question merely of "dantesque tone," or comparisons of general style. Rizzi does not usually make clear whether the parallel passages are intended as examples of influence or simply as illustrations" ; whether Michelangelo wrote such and such because he had in mind, or had had in: mind, the passage which Rizzi cites, or whether it is only Rizzi who has in mind the passage cited. I suppose it comes to be largely a question of iteration, but I should like to raise the general question as to how far it is possible, without very much more external evidence than we actually possess in the case of Michelangelo, to formulate any general rules for drawing the line between influence and comparison. When, for instance, Rizzi (p. 141) comments on a line of Michelangelo describing the limbs of the body as wearied and pilgrim " (pellegrine)-" Man is a pilgrim through life; Purgatorio xiii, 96," he seems to me to be nodding : the idea of life as a pilgrimage is so common that it is needless to seek for any comparison. When, however, he cites (p. 14) Paradiso xvii, 51, 1ft dove Cristo tutto dl si merca" (referring to Rome and the Pope), in relation to Michelangelo's sonnet inveighing against the obsession of Rome with armaments and money to the detriment of art commissions, Qua si fa elmi di calici, e spade, I e'l sangue di Cristo si vend' a giumelle . ." (G. 157; F. 8) ; and when in the same sonnet the Pope is styled" quel nel manto" and Rizzi cites Inferno, xix, 69, where Boniface VIII describes himself as vestito del gran manto"; then, given the knowledge that Michelangelo read Dante, there is a case for saying that in the writing of this sonnet he was recalling Dante; though even so the theme of the sonnet is admittedly constantly recurring in literature since the trecento. There is the further obvious difficulty in his poetry of distinguishing the influence of or echoes from Dante and the influence of or echoes from Petrarch and the quattrocento.
1/ 1/ 1/ 1/ 1/

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Rizzi's notes frequently refer for the same passage both to Dante and to Petrarch or later poets; how much might be added in this way by another scholar I am not competent to suggest; but I suggest that fuller work on Michelangelo's vocabulary, grammar, and uses of metre is needed before any sound generalisations can be made about their relation to Dante. If I am dubious as to the direct influence of Dante on Michelangelo as seen in his creative work, if I have tried to emphasise that Michelangelo was above all Michelangelesque, rather than Dantesque ; in the realm of general comparison I am ready enough to fling caution at the feet of the two greatest of Florentines in the arts. Michelangelo the sculptor, painter, and architect, has a sweep and scale of articulated grandeur that vies with the sustained immensity of Dante's creation. Both have the supreme quality of universality, unbound by locality, unconfined to the limits of their age. And the one turned to the other exclaiming :JI

Fuss' io pur lui I ch' a tal fortuna nato, per r aspro esilio suo con la virtute dare' del mondo il piu felice stato." (G. 153; F. 144.)

B. H.
BALLIOL CoLLEGE, OxFORD.

SUMNER