LXVL, LXVII.  These two sonnets were sent to Giorgio Vasari in 1555(?) with this letter:  Messer Giorgio, io vi mando dua sonetti; e benche sieno cosa sciocca, il fo perche veggiate dove io tengo i mie’ pensieri:  e quando arete ottantuno anni, come o io, mi crederete.  Pregovi gli diate a messer Giovan Francesco Fattucci, che me ne a chiesti.  Vostro Michelagniolo Buonarroti in Roma.  The first was also sent to Monsignor Beccadelli, Archbishop of Ragusa, who replied to it.  For his sonnet, see Signor Guasti’s edition, p. 233.

LXVIII.  Date 1556.  Written in reply to his friend’s invitation that he should pay him a visit at Ragusa.  Line 10:  this Urbino was M.A.’s old and faithful servant, Francesco d’Amadore di Casteldurante, who lived with him twenty-six years, and died at Rome in 1556.

LXIX.-LXXVII.  The dates of this series of penitential sonnets are not known.  It is clear that they were written in old age.  It will be remembered that the latest piece of marble on which Michael Angelo worked, was the unfinished Pieta now standing behind the choir of the Duomo at Florence.  Many of his latest drawings are designs for a Crucifixion.

NOTES ON CAMPANELLA’S SONNETS.

I. Line 1:  the Italian words which I have translated God’s Wisdom and Philosophy are Senno and Sofia.  Campanella held that the divine Senno penetrated the whole universe, and, meeting with created Sofia, gave birth to Science.  This sonnet is therefore a sort of Mythopoem, figuring the process whereby true knowledge, as distinguished from sophistry, is derived by the human reason interrogating God in Nature and within the soul.  Line 5:  Sofia has for her husband Senno; the human intellect is married to the divine.  Line 9:  it was the doctrine of Campanella and the school to which he belonged, that no advance in knowledge could be made except by the direct exploration of the universe, and that the authority of schoolmen, Aristotelians, and the like, must be broken down before a step could be made in the right direction.  This germ of modern science is sufficiently familiar to us in the exposition of Bacon.  Line 12:  repeats the same idea.  Facts presented by Nature are of more value than any Ipse dixit.  Line 14:  he compares himself not without reason to Prometheus; for twenty-five years spent in prison were his reward for the revelation which has added a new sphere to human thought.

II.  The bitter words of this sonnet will not seem unmerited to those who have studied Italian poetry in the Cinque Cento—­the refined playthings of verse, the romances, and the burlesque nonsense, which amused a corrupt though highly cultivated age.

III.  Campanella held the doctrine of an Anima Mundi in the fullest and deepest sense of the term.  The larger and more complex the organism, the more it held, in his opinion, of thought and sentient life.  Thus the stars, in the language of Aristotle, are [Greek:  thiotera aemon].  Compare Sonnets VIII., XIX.