entury has left us in sculpture little more than an
immortal gesture of despair, of despair of a world which he has not been
content to love. His work is beautiful with the beauty of the mountains,
of the mountains in which he alone has found the spirit of man. His
figures, half unveiled from the living rock, are like some terrible
indictment of the world he lived in, and in a sort of rage at its
uselessness he leaves them unfinished, and it but half expressed;--an
indictment of himself too, of his own heart, of his contempt for things
as they are. Yet in his youth he had been content with beauty--in the
lovely Pieta of S. Pietro, for instance, where, on the robe of Mary,
alone in all his work he has placed his name; or in the statue of
Bacchus, now here in the Bargello, sleepy, half drunken with wine or
with visions, the eyelids heavy with dreams, the cup still in his hand.
But already in the David his trouble is come upon him; the sorrow that
embittered his life has been foreseen, and in a sort of protest against
the enslavement of Florence, that nest where he was born, he creates
this hero, who seems to be waiting for some tyranny to declare itself.
The Brutus, unfinished as we say, to-day in the Bargello, he refused to
touch again, since that city which was made for a thousand lovers, as he
said, had been enjoyed by one only, some Medici against whom, as we
know, he was ready to fight. If in the beautiful relief of Madonna we
find a sweetness and strength that is altogether without bitterness or
indignation, it is not any religious consolation we find there, but such
comfort rather as life may give when in a moment of inward tragedy we
look on the stars or watch a mother with her little son. What secret and
immortal sorrow and resentment are expressed in those strange and
beautiful figures of the tombs in the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo! The names
we have, given them are, as Pater has said, too definite for them; they
suggest more than we know how to express of our thoughts concerning
life, so that for once the soul of man seems there to have taken form
and turned to stone. The unfinished Pieta in the Duomo, it is said, he
carved for his own grave: like so much of his great, tragical work, it
is unfinished, unfinished though everything he did was complete from the
beginning. For he is like the dawn that brings with it noon and evening,
he is like the day which will pass into the night. In him the spirit of
man has stammere