Part 23 (1/2)

III. Belonging to the year 1506, when Michael Angelo quarrelled with Julius and left Rome in anger. The tree referred to in the last line is the oak of the Rovere family.

IV. Same date, and same circ.u.mstances. The autograph has these words at the foot of the sonnet: _Vostro Miccelangniolo, in Turchia._ Rome itself, the Sacred City, has become a land of infidels.

V. Ser Giovanni da Pistoja was Chancellor of the Florentine Academy.

The date is probably 1509. The _Sonetto a Coda_ is generally humorous or satiric.

VI. Written in one of those moments of _affanno_ or _stizzo_ to which the sculptor was subject. For the old bitterness of feeling between Florence and Pistoja, see Dante, _Inferno._

VII. Michael Angelo was ill during the summer of 1544, and was nursed by Luigi del Riccio in his own house, Shortly after his recovery he quarrelled with his friend, and wrote him this sonnet as well as a very angry letter.

VIII. p. 38. Cecchino Bracci was a boy of rare and surpa.s.sing beauty who died at Rome, January 8, 1544, in his seventeenth year. Besides this sonnet, which refers to a portrait Luigi del Riccio had asked him to make of the dead youth, Michael Angelo composed a series of forty-eight quatrains upon the same subject, and sent them to his friend Luigi.

Michelangelo the younger, thinking that _'l'ignoranzia degli uomini ha campo di mormorare,'_ suppressed the name Cecchino and changed _lui_ into _lei._ Date about 1544.

IX. Line 4: 'The Archangel's scales alone can weigh my grat.i.tude against your gift.' Lines 5-8: 'Your courtesy has taken away all my power of responding to it. I am as helpless as a s.h.i.+p becalmed, or a wisp of straw on a stormy sea.'

X. Michael Angelo, when asked to make a portrait of his friend's mistress, declares that he is unable to do justice to her beauty. The name _Mancina_ is a pun upon the Italian word for the left arm, _Mancino_. This lady was a famous and venal beauty, mentioned among the loves of the poet Molsa.

XI. Date, 1550.

XII. This and the three next sonnets may with tolerable certainty be referred to the series written on various occasions for Vittoria Colonna.

XIII. Sent together with a letter, in which we read: _l'aportatore di questa sara Urbino, che sta meco_. Urbino was M. A.'s old servant, workman, and friend. See No. LXVIII. and note.

XIV. The thought is that, as the sculptor carves a statue from a rough model by addition and subtraction of the marble, so the lady of his heart refines and perfects his rude native character.

XV. This sonnet is the theme of Varchi's _Lezione_. There is nothing to prove that it was addressed to Vittoria Colonna. Varchi calls it '_un suo altissimo sonetto pieno di quella antica purezza e dantesca gravita_.'

XVI. The thought of the fifteenth is repeated with some variations. His lady's heart holds for the lover good and evil things, according as he has the art to draw them forth.

XVIII. In the terzets he describes the temptations of the artist-nature, over-sensitive to beauty. Michelangelo the younger so altered these six lines as to destroy the autobiographical allusion.--Cp. No. XXVIII., note.

XIX. The lover's heart is like an intaglio, precious by being inscribed with his lady's image.

XX. An early composition, written on the back of a letter sent to the sculptor in Bologna by his brother Simone in 1507. M.A. was then working at the bronze statue of Julius II. Who the lady of his love was, we do not know. Notice the absence of Platonic _concetti_.

XXIII. It is hardly necessary to call attention to Michael Angelo's oft-recurring Platonism. The thought that the eye alone perceives the celestial beauty, veiled beneath the fleshly form of the beloved, is repeated in many sonnets--especially in XXV., XXVIII.

XXIV. Composed probably in the year 1529.

XXV. Written on the same sheet as the foregoing sonnet, and composed probably in the same year. The thought is this: beauty pa.s.sing from the lady into the lover's soul, is there spiritualised and becomes the object of a spiritual love.

XXVII. To escape from his lady, either by interposing another image of beauty between the thought of her and his heart, or by flight, is impossible.

XXVIII. Compare Madrigal VII. in ill.u.s.tration of lines 5 to 8. By the a.n.a.logy of that pa.s.sage, I should venture to render lines 6 and 7 thus:

He made thee light, and me the eyes of art; Nor fails my soul to find G.o.d's counterpart.

x.x.x. Varchi, quoting this sonnet in his _Lezione_, conjectures that it was composed for Tommaso Cavalieri.