Shakespeare’s genius could breathe life into all things human, and he found satisfaction in doing so.  Michelangelo’s creative, plastic power seemed illimitable; he possessed all the gifts an artist could possibly have, but from year to year his conviction of the futility of all earthly things grew to a profounder certainty.  He had knocked at the iron gate of humanity with his hammer and his chisel; they had broken into fragments and sorrow made him dumb.  There is a stage in the life of every genius when he comes to this gate, when he has to show his credentials and reveal the inmost kernel of his being.  Dante attempted to grasp the transcendental in one gigantic vision, Goethe timidly shrank back from it.

In examining the prophets and youths in the Sistine Chapel, or the chained men in the Louvre, who seem unable to bear existence, and are therefore “slaves” of the earth; or in contemplating the half-finished slaves in the Boboli Gardens, who seem almost to burst the stone in their wild longing for a higher life; or in reading his last sonnets, we can conceive a vague idea of the deep melancholy darkening the life of this man, a gloom which was not the melancholy of the individual, but of all humanity, unable and unwilling to deceive itself further.  Can there be a greater tragedy than the tragedy of this incomparable artist, looking back at the work of his lifetime with despair?

     For art and wit and passion fade and vanish,
     Countless achievements, ever new and great,
     Are naught but dross within the sight of heaven.

To Vasari he sent a sonnet denouncing the artistic passion which abandons itself completely to art: 

Now know I well that that fond phantasy
Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
Of earthly art is vain.

(Transl. by J.A.  SYMONDS.)

Faith, is to him “the mercy of mercies,” for he has never possessed its deepest conviction.

But the passion which burned in him remained unquelled to the last:  his soul is torn between love and the thought of death.

Flames of love
And chill of death are battling in my heart.

He longed to break away from love and find peace, and he called on death for delivery, but in vain: 

Burdened with years and full of sinfulness
With evil customs grown inveterate,
Both deaths I dread that both before me wait,
Yet feed my heart on poisonous thoughts no less.

(Transl. by J.A.  SYMONDS.)

And later on he thanks love again for being his deliverer, and not death.

Michelangelo poured all his heart into these last sonnets.  We see his solitary and heroic age overshadowed by the thought of death.  His whole soul is wrapped in gloom; art is vanity, love is sorrow, the thought of the futility of all things frames the portrait of his love with a wreath of black laurel.  He ponders on his life, and comes to the conclusion that