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Updated: June 14, 2025
Much feasting, much rejoicing, in the brilliant and jovial circle presided over by Aretino and the brother Triumvirs, followed upon our master's return to Venice.
Vasari tells us of some of these men and their works: "He loved his workmen and was on friendly terms with them. Among them were Jacopo Sansovino, Il Pontormo, Daniele da Volterra, and Giorgio Vasari Aretino, to whom he showed infinite kindness...." He goes on to say that "he was unfortunate in those who lived with him, since he chanced upon natures unfit to follow him.
Aretino had the hardihood to dedicate one volume of his letters to the King of England, another to the Duke of Florence; a third to Hercules of Este, a relative of Pope Julius Third evidently insinuating that his letters were worthy to be read by the royal and the noble.
Angelo, in that city, there is found the very extraordinary story of the painter Spinello Aretino, to which Lanzi alludes briefly, in his History of Painting in Italy.
At that time was Monsieur Petro Aretino searcher and chiefe Inquisiter for the colledge of curtizans. Diuerse and sundrie wayes was this Aretine beholding to the king of England, especially for by this foresaid M. Russell a little before he had sent him a pension of foure hundreth crownes yerely during his life.
Gronau suggests it may belong to the following year; see also p. 104. Cf. Lettere di Pietro Aretino , vol. iii. p. 238. How weary one grows of the ways of a city, yes, even in Florence, where every street runs into the country and one may always see the hills and the sky!
He laughs and sneers to make up for his deficiencies, like that Pietro Aretino who threw his perishable mud at Michael Angelo. So is it always with the vulgarian out of his sphere. Once he dared to talk vulgarly of God to a great man who believed in God Count Tolstoi.
So it is, too, with certain exaggerations of design characteristic rather of the period than the man notably with the two figures to the left of the foreground. The Christ in His meekness is too little divine, too heavy and inert; the Pontius Pilate not inappropriately reproduces the features of the worldling and viveur Aretino.
We pass on at the Accademia from Cimabue's pupil Giotto, to Giotto's followers, Taddeo Gaddi and Bernardo Daddi, and Daddi's follower Spinello Aretino, and the long dependent and interdependent line of painters. For the most part they painted altar-pieces, these early craftsmen, the Church being the principal patron of art.
Sansovino himself was neither original nor powerful enough, to elevate the mixed motives of Renaissance sculpture by any lofty idealisation. To do that remained for Michael Angelo. The greatness of Michael Angelo consists in this that while literature was sinking into the frivolity of Academies and the filth of the Bernesque "Capitoli," while the barefaced villanies of Aretino won him credit, while sensual magnificence formed the ideal of artists who were neither Greeks nor Christians, while Ariosto found no subject fitter for his genius than a glittering romance, he and he alone maintained the Dantesque dignity of the Italian intellect in his sculpture. Michael Angelo stands so far apart from other men, and is so gigantic a force for good and evil in the history of art, that to estimate his life and labour in relation to the Renaissance must form the subject of a separate chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that his immediate scholars, Raffaello da Montelupo, and Gian Angelo Montorsoli, caught little from their master but the mannerism of contorted form and agitated action. This mannerism, a blemish even in the strong work of Buonarroti, became ridiculous when adopted by men of feeble powers and passionless imagination. By straining the art of sculpture to its utmost limits, Michael Angelo expressed vehement emotions in marble; and the forced attitudes affected in his work had their value as significant of spiritual struggle. His imitators showed none of their master's sublime force, none of that terribilit
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