Condivi perhaps exaggerated the influence of lovely nature, horses, dogs, flowers, hills, woods, &c., on Michelangelo’s genius.  His work, as we know, is singularly deficient in motives drawn from any province but human beauty; and his poems and letters contain hardly a trace of sympathy with the external world.  Yet, in the main contention, Condivi told the truth.  Michelangelo’s poems and letters, and the whole series of his works in fresco and marble, suggest no single detail which is sensuous, seductive, enfeebling to the moral principles.  Their tone may be passionate; it is indeed often red-hot with a passion like that of Lucretius and Beethoven; but the genius of the man transports the mind to spiritual altitudes, where the lust of the eye and the longings of the flesh are left behind us in a lower region.  Only a soul attuned to the same chord of intellectual rapture can breathe in that fiery atmosphere and feel the vibrations of its electricity.

XI

I have used Michelangelo’s poems freely throughout this work as documents illustrative of his opinions and sentiments, and also in their bearing on the events of his life.  I have made them reveal the man in his personal relations to Pope Julius II., to Vittoria Colonna, to Tommaso dei Cavalieri, to Luigi del Riccio, to Febo di Poggio.  I have let them tell their own tale, when sorrow came upon him in the death of his father and Urbino, and when old age shook his lofty spirit with the thought of approaching death.  I have appealed to them for lighter incidents:  matters of courtesy, the completion of the Sistine vault, the statue of Night at S. Lorenzo, the subjection of Florence to the Medici, his heart-felt admiration for Dante’s genius.  Examples of his poetic work, so far as these can be applied to the explanation of his psychology, his theory of art, his sympathies, his feeling under several moods of passion, will consequently be found scattered up and down by volumes.  Translation, indeed, is difficult to the writer, and unsatisfactory to the reader.  But I have been at pains to direct an honest student to the original sources, so that he may, if he wishes, compare my versions with the text.  Therefore I do not think it necessary to load this chapter with voluminous citations.  Still, there remains something to be said about Michelangelo as poet, and about the place he occupies as poet in Italian literature.

The value of Michelangelo’s poetry is rather psychological than purely literary.  He never claimed to be more than an amateur, writing to amuse himself.  His style is obscure, crabbed, ungrammatical.  Expression only finds a smooth and flowing outlet when the man’s nature is profoundly stirred by some powerful emotion, as in the sonnets to Cavalieri, or the sonnets on the deaths of Vittoria Colonna and Urbino, or the sonnets on the thought of his own death.  For the most part, it is clear that he found great