Michelangelo, God's Architect: The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece by William E. Wallace

Author:William E. Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Architecture, Art, Artists; Architects; Photographers, Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Europe, History, Italy, Renaissance
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-11-19T03:00:00+00:00

Unlike Dante, Michelangelo was not in the middle of his life’s journey but conspicuously at its end, and still the artist had not found his way, his “diritta via.” Finally, he turned the sheet ninety degrees and scribbled a fourth version of the line ending in “error carca,” thus reiterating his lament of a life “laden with error.”65 The disrupted composition of the sonnet and the writer’s descent into increasingly negative ruminations on art and life are not evident if we read only the finished and less depressing version of the sonnet that Michelangelo sent to Giorgio Vasari (especially as rendered in a lively translation by the poet Frederick Nims):

So now it’s over, my day’s long voyage, through

tumultuous ocean, in a hull unsteady;

I’ve come to the world’s last anchorage, and make ready

life’s log with its every reckoning, foul and fair.

The daft illusion once so cuddled there

that art was a sovereign lord to idolize,

I’ve come to know—how well!—was a pack of lies,

such as, to their grief, men treasure yet as true.

Fond, foolish, the lovesick longings felt before,

what becomes of them, my double death approaching?

One certain-sure, one muttering harsh alarms.

Painting and sculpture soothe the soul no more,

its focus fixed on the love divine, outstretching

on the cross, to enfold us closer, open arms.66

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