RENAISSANCE AND  MANNERISM C.   I&O-C.   l6OO
Palazzo Cbierigati is the most perfect example of this screen technique
in palace architecture, although, in its serenity, different from Floren-
tine and Roman Mannerism and particularly from Michelangelo.
Palladio's palace may have a certain coolness too, but it is not icy as
the Laurenziana.
This frozen self-discipline is not usually connected with the genius of
Michelangelo and therefore needs special emphasis, emphasis above
all because textbooks in Britain very often still treat Michelangelo
as a master of the Renaissance. The truth is that he belonged to the
Renaissance only for a very few years of his early career. His Pieta
of 1499 may be a work of the High Renaissance. His David may be
in the spirit of the Renaissance too. Of his Sistine Ceiling this can
be said only to a limited extent; and of his work after 1515 hardly
ever. His character made it impossible for him to accept the ideals
of the Renaissance for long. He was the very opposite of Castiglione's
Courtier and Leonardo da Vinci: unsociable, distrustful, a fanatical
worker, negligent in his personal appearance, deeply religious and
uncompromisingly proud. Hence his dislike for Leonardo, and for
Bramante and Raphael, a dislike made up of contempt and envy. We
know more of his character and his life than of those of any artist
before. The unprecedented adoration for him caused the publication
of two biographies while he was still alive. Both are based on
a systematic collecting of material. It is good that it should be so;
for we feel we must know much about him to understand his art. In
the Middle Ages the personality of an architect could never to that
degree have influenced his style. Brunelleschi, though clearer to us
as a character than the architects of the Gothic cathedrals, is still
surprisingly objective in his forms. Michelangelo was the first to
turn architecture into an instrument of individual expression. The
terribilitb that frightened those who met him fills us with awe im-
mediately we are faced with any work of his, a room, a drawing, a
piece of sculpture or a sonnet.
For Michelangelo was a consummate poet too, one of the pro-
foundest of his age; and in his poems he gives to posterity a reckon-
ing of his struggles. The fiercest of them was that between a platonic
ideal of beauty and a fervent faith in Christ. It is in the most con-
centrated form the struggle between the age of the Renaissance in
which he lived when he was young, and that of the Counter-Re-
formation and Mannerism that began when he was about fifty years
old, just before the sack of Rome in 1527. Now new stricter
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