Petrarca, and Boccaccio, appeared Giotto, Simon Memmi, and Gaddi; and when, in a later age, philosophy, poetry and art again revived, Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano, Landino, Pico di Mirandola, Pontano, and Lorenzo de' Medici were the ornaments of literature; whilst Donatello, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titian, and Correggio shed a lustre on art*.

A remarkable feature in art at this period is its character of generality. Its various branches, instead of being separated and cut off from the rest, were considered as intimately connected in their objects, and pursued in common. In Vasari's Lives of the Painters we see the painter, the architect, the sculptor, the poet, the philosopher, frequently united in the

*To these names we might add L. da Vinci, Fra Bartolomeo, Perugino, Giulio Romano, Giorgione, and others,—all born within fifty years! The decline of poetry in Italy in the seventeenth century was more rapid than that of art. The above remark holds good with some restrictions. Music, though amongst the earliest of the arts which were revived in the middle ages, did not keep an equal pace with the rest. In the fifteenth century,-the golden epoch of the sister arts,—the history of music in Italy presents almost a blank; Josquin and Ockenheim were Flemings. Palestrina, Luca Marenzio, Gio. Croce, and Nanino flourished in the sixteenth century. It is an interesting fact, that an intimacy seems in most countries and ages to have subsisted between the greatest men who have adorned the sister arts. I may instance the friendship of Dante for Giotto and Casella, of Petrarca for Simon Memmi, of Shakspeare and Dowland, of Ben Jonson and Ferrabosco, of Milton and Lawes, of Goethe and Zelter. I say generally, for in humiliating contrast stand the conduct of Dryden to Purcell, who withheld his approbation of that great master until he ceased to need it, and the disgraceful insults which Addison and Pope on every occasion ignorantly heaped upon music.

same man.

Leonardo da Vinci is the most striking instance of versatility of talent, but Michael Angelo that of solidity of acquirement. He was great in everything which he pursued; nor least did he merit the reward to which he made no claim, of the poet's wreath.

The works of Michael Angelo are stamped with the characteristics of unity of thought, sublimity of conception, and grandeur of design; if the attainment of the high feeling which these evince was the result of profound study and reflection, as unquestionably it was, a just estimate of his character and powers can only be gained by an insight into the secrets of his mind, the springs of thought which animated his soul and directed his hand. In this view his poetry becomes highly interesting and valuable, as revealing to us the sources of his feeling for art, and the training ✔ it underwent; and the more so because, with the exception of a few letters, and a Discourse he delivered. before the Florentine Academy, it is the only key left us to the mysteries of his great and glorious creations.

The productions of our great artist's pen rank unquestionably in the number of the most perfect of his own or any subsequent age. Stamped by a flow of eloquence, a purity of style, an habitual nobleness of sentiment, they discover a depth of thought rarely equalled, and frequently approaching to the sublimity of Dante. He did not allow his compositions to be published during his lifetime; they were the secret intercourse which his genius, in her loneliness on

earth, held with eternal truths, untroubled with the thought of descending to the reach of inferior intellects. He alone possessed the key of his philosophic and poetic system; its elements are scattered and confused, and to recover and collect them must be the work of application and study. If the task of translating the poetry of Michael Angelo is difficult, that of analysing it is still more so: we have to follow through the labyrinth of his inspirations, scattered ✓ like the Sibyl's leaves, the clue which guided his own superior reason, and which he cared not to render visible to others. Whatever may be the usual disadvantage of a paraphrase, it must in this instance go step by step with translation; and Michael Angelo has need of a commentator in order to find a faithful interpreter*.

In the honourable record of those to whom the arts are most indebted, stands pre-eminently the name of Lorenzo de' Medici. Gifted by nature with extraordinary powers of mind, a love of literature, and an exquisite refinement of taste in art, these endowments were cultivated and developed under the instruction of Landino, Argyropylus, and Marsilio Ficino. Destined not only to be the restorer of his native tongue, but to foster the revival of letters and of art, he established a school of his favourite Platonic philosophy, which had at that time superseded the Aristo

* See an article on the poetry of M. Angelo in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, for 1833, of which I have in several instances availed myself.

telian; he gathered around him a circle of the great scholars of the age, and sought, in the prosecution of his patriotic views, to associate philosophy with art, and to raise the latter to a more elevated position.

"The riches of Cosmo de' Medici and the industry of Donatello united to give rise to the celebrated collection of antiquities which, with considerable additions, was transmitted by Piero to his son Lorenzo, and is now denominated the Museum Florentinum...... But it is not the industry, the liberality, or the judgement shown by Lorenzo in forming his magnificent collection, so much as the important purpose to which he destined it, that entitled him to the esteem of the professors and admirers of the arts. Conversant from his youth with the finest forms of antiquity, he perceived and lamented the inferiority of his contemporary artists, and the impossibility of their improvement upon the principles then adopted. He determined, therefore, to excite among them, if possible, a better taste, and by proposing to their imitation the remains of the ancient masters, to elevate their views beyond the forms of common life, to the contemplation of that ideal beauty which alone distinguishes works of art from mere mechanical productions*."

This was the school into which Michael Angelo was at an early age introduced, and it is impossible perhaps to estimate the value to posterity of the advantages he there met with. In the gardens of Lorenzo's Academy his eye became habituated to forms of

*Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de' Medici.

beauty, to the treasures of the ancient schools of art ; whilst in the society and intimacy of Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano, Pico di Mirandola, and of Lorenzo himself*, his thoughts were cast and formed in the mould of philosophy. Its doctrines he carried into his art, and they schooled and refined his naturally ardent feelings, and directed them to a definite though abstract idea of perfection. His works discover the effect which such a mental discipline engendered. It led him to cultivate that meditative disposition which revealed to him the grand principles of art, taught him to regard design as the creative expression of the workings of the soul; and, filled with sublimity of conception, the most glorious attribute of which the mind is capable, the link connecting it with divinity, he studied to bring out its revelations, and to create the image from a contemplation of the form in the Creator's own works. The beauty he worshiped was purely intellectual; it was the union of all ideas of greatness and excellence it was the beauty of perfection; whatever his mind fixed upon as the nearest approach to this, which alone resides in the Creator, he followed, he studied, he in a manner adored; and if, with himself, we may say

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Ch' amar dee l'opra chi'l suo Fabro adorat,"

* The poetry of Lorenzo ranks foremost in the productions of his age. I scarcely know anything more beautiful than his Laude, or his poem entitled L'Altercazione, in which he gives a poetical exposition of the doctrines of Plato as taught by Ficino. +"Ama Creatorem in creaturâ." (St. Augustine.)