A Tale Told of Michelangelo

Let us shatter the chains of time and undo its fetters and go free; let us suppose the age to be one of the ages gone by — let it be the fifteenth century.

In that century the Pope was the ruler of the old world, in the West, and its absolute prince, governing as he pleased and how he pleased, his rule running over all who followed him, with no difference between master and subject, king and slave.

And this authority of his was far beyond the reach of the tongues of rebels and malcontents, beyond the reach of any man's eyes.

One day of days the Pope heard that a singular artist, the like of whom life rarely bestows, was living in Florence — that goodly town, now tranquil, now in revolt — and the herald of glory cried out within him, and the fingers of immortality played upon his skin, and he desired him to come. So he came, and entered Rome the capital, and its people caught sight of him and asked: Who is this!?

And they were told:

— Michelangelo Buonarroti.

The Pope welcomed this young man of strange dress, with his broken nose and his bushy beard, walking in his portico without fear, angry at every man, resentful of everything. He put out his hands, and when he came level with His Holiness he bowed according to the prevailing custom, then straightened up again and conversed with him face to face in a voice of measured tones and steady ring; and the arms and hands, with their many motions, showed that his talk was the talk of imagination, holding within it a special project for the raising of a huge and matchless monument.

After an hour or thereabouts the man of religion turned to the man of art, saying:

— And how much do you ask as payment for this work of yours?

— A hundred thousand "scudi."

— And if we made it two hundred thousand... would you agree?

Come... begin the work.

— It is a rare generosity on the Church's part, without a doubt.

Michelangelo went out cutting the marble as he wished and carving it into statues as he pleased, working night and day without rest or siesta; and at the week's end he would make for the Pope's treasury and enter upon him without asking leave, collect his wage, and find in the coolness of the coins' touch something that softened the edge of his weariness and soothed his exhausted nerves — until, when enchanting Aurora mounted her golden chariot at the dawn of the next day, the young man stirred in his bed, then rose brimming with vigor and strength, on his lips the smile of a man who believes in himself, who loves life not out of infatuation with it but because it is a stretch of time that opens to him the field of creation and invention.

And the days went creeping lightly by, as though they moved to the fall of Angelo's hammer and the rhythms of his chisel; the marble chips fell here and there, and the statues came free — beautiful, alive, strong, moving — challenging by their form and their might man and his greatness, and lifting their noses proudly toward immortality.

The days went on in this fashion until out of the darkness came a man — one of those created to live in darkness — who obstructed their course, told tales against Angelo, and whispered to the Pope private words which no one heard at the time, and whose result was known to only one person: he who knows the secrets of such conversations — and this keeper of the money — as is hidden from no one — is always the part that cannot be severed from the crime of power.

It became difficult for Angelo to find his way smoothed to the sacred thresholds; the coins grew lighter in his hands and their ring grew fainter; the officials put him off and delayed rendering him his due day after day, until the treasurer confronted him with the words:

— I have from His Holiness an order to expel you; he does not wish ever to see you again!...
I know you well and hold you in honor, but these are orders from on high.

And the earth swayed with everything upon it — except Michelangelo. He felt his heat rising and rising, and his breast surging with anger and fury. He looked at the treasurer, pressing his lips together, lifting his flattened, broken nose; his beard shook, his thick, disheveled mustache quivered, and his lips parted upon a curse which, had the officials known its meaning, the history of art would have been changed most gravely...

On the next day the Pope spread open before him a paper bearing a few words written in the hand of a nervous, furious man:

"Most Holy Father,
I was driven from your palace this morning, and by order of Your Holiness; if you should have need of me again, you must look for me in some place other than Rome."

And Angelo sold his possessions and his goods, then mounted his horse for the city of flowers.

In Florence the people honor their men, and Michelangelo was a man whose like the gods themselves begrudge; no wonder, then, that he defended himself and the whole city defended him. When the Pope's envoys arrived demanding him — by force if need be — they understood that such a thing was difficult, that any hand stretched out toward him would be cut off, and that any man who approached him with ill intent would meet his death without hesitation. It is a fine thing for one to witness the contest of art and religion in the person of a man who loved them both... but he preferred art, and he was not afraid...

Rome's letters rained down upon Florence one after another, reassuring the man about a return to the capital; in one of them the Pope wrote to the governor of the city, saying:

"Michelangelo the sculptor, who left us without warning or regard for us, fears, so far as we know, to return. We bear him no grudge and no rancor, for we know the ways and tempers of men of his kind. He may set aside every suspicion he harbors concerning us. We wish also to remind you that obedience is owed to us and to our will, and therefore we ask you to promise him in our name that if he returns to us he shall return free and assured, and we shall welcome him with the warm feeling we used to bestow upon him before he departed."

A letter such as this weighed heavily, no doubt, upon the rulers of Florence, and Angelo understood that if he ignored it the worst of calamities would overtake him. When the second letter arrived, the governor sent for Angelo to say to him:

— You have treated the Pope as the King of France himself would not dare to treat him, and we must put an end to this affair. We shall not stir up a war against the Pope for your sake and so imperil the safety of the state and expose it to indignity. Come... put your affairs in order for the return to Rome.

The artist sensed a spreading evil, and he actually thought of flight. The Sultan of Istanbul sent asking for him and opening to him the doors of his sultanate — and Istanbul had long been breathing in the flowers of Florence and their fragrance — and had Angelo gone down to the sultanate he would have found before him, as some say, a wide field for work and many projects standing ready. But a third letter arrived from the Pope, and there was no longer any escape from returning and meeting His Holiness midway on the road between Rome and Florence. When Angelo arrived he found the Pope awaiting him, and he bowed before him to receive his blessing, and His Holiness answered, saying:

— It was your duty to present yourself to us of your own accord; instead of that, you waited until we came ourselves to look for you!... And he meant by this that Bologna — where they met... was nearer to the city of flowers and art than to the city of churches and religion.

Angelo replied, saying:
— Your Holiness must not forget that you wronged me without any fault or sin of mine!...

And the Pope bowed his head without uttering a word or offering an answer. One of the priests wished to save the situation, and turned to him, repeating:

— Your Holiness must bear with this man's errors, for they are the fruit and offspring of ignorance; painters are all like that, and sculptors too, in spite of themselves.

The Pope started up in anger, continuing:
— It is you who wrong him, not we; you who direct insult at him and abuse him; you are the ignorant fool, not he. Go... go, and may the devil take you.

They say the priest was slow in leaving, so the servants carried him out by force; and the Pope breathed out, scattering his fury, and blessed Angelo, and "pardoned" him, and asked him to fashion for him a statue to be cast in bronze. When he had finished his work Angelo returned to Florence, where he found a new letter from the Pope asking him to return to Rome to continue building the monument and raising its galleries — as he wished — and he returned...

Rome awoke early, in the forenoon of the twenty-first of February in the year 1513, to the sound of church bells and chimes, and its people asked, as was their habit, what the matter might be; they were told that Pope Julius II — patron of the monument of which the statue of Moses became one of its figures — had died. Many eyes wept for him and loving hearts grieved for him... but time paid no heed: it neither tarried nor stopped.

Leo X took his place on the eleventh of March. And on the sixth of May the officials met to decide upon the continuation of the memorial's construction; they renewed the contract with Angelo, and he set to work, having devoted to it seven years of his life, and wrote of it, saying:
— This work upon which my thoughts are set will be a thing whose like shall never appear upon the face of this earth.

This, my friend, is a single episode from the life of the greatest of artists, now sleeping — an episode with His Holiness the Supreme Pontiff... in one of the ages of the dark centuries... and it ended as every episode between art and anything else ends: with the victory of the former and its immortality... Have you not heard Angelo singing in one of his poems, addressing the artist:

"By bringing the dead old memories back to life you bestow upon them and upon yourself, despite time and nature, a fame that shall not perish, and a life that shall never pass away."

And do not grieve. For Michelangelo lived long enough in time to witness thirteen popes — beginning with Sixtus IV and ending with Pius IV. Several popes came before them and several popes followed after them.

But the whole world has never seen the like of Michelangelo, neither before him nor after him, and it may never see it at all... for the gods are not always strong enough to create such men.

On the morning of the eighteenth of February in the year 1564 the people awoke to strange sounds their ears had never known before, unlike the sound of church bells, unlike the ringing of chimes... The whole world awoke to understand that Angelo's chisel and hammer had truly fallen from his hands, and that his brush had dropped... and that he was dead!... Then all eyes wept for him, and all hearts grieved for him, and it was as though time, for the first time, its heart broken within it, tarried... and then stopped.

Beirut, 28/5/1947