RENAISSANCE AND MANNEHISM C. I42O-C. I6OO
of, and beyond, the Renaissance conceived both the styles of the
i<Sth and the I7th centuries. The i6th followed his manner and turned
it into Mannerism, the iyth appreciated the terribiliti of his conflicts
and made Baroque out of it. So the eternal city is crowned not by a
symbol of Renaissance worldliness, as Julius II has visualised it, but
by an overwhelming synthesis of Mannerism and Baroque, and at
the same time of Antiquity and Christianity.
It was Michelangelo's last three-dimensional work of such violence.
He was seventy-two when he designed it. The eighteen years that
were left to him he spent in meditation on life after death. "Let
there be no more painting, no more carving," he says in one of his
late sonnets, "to soothe the soul turned towards that Divine Love
which opened His arms from the cross to receive us/'
"Nbpinger nl scolpirfia pih che quieti
L'anima voita a quell9 Amor Divino
C'aperse,aprendernoij *ncroce le braccia."
He carved after this only three more groups, all three Entombments
of Christ. One of them was for his own tomb, one he left unfinished,
or rather; sublimated to so immaterial a form that it can no longer be
regarded as sculpture in the Renaissance sense. His late drawings too
are spiritualised to a degree almost unbearable in an artist who had
done more than any before him to glorify the beauty and vigour
of body and movement. And one of his last architectural plans—a
fact not widely enough known—was to design the Roman church
of the newly founded, severely counter-reformatory order of the
Jesuits. He offered to take charge of the building without any fee,
just as he had refused to accept a salary as architect to St. Peter's.
The Gesu was not begun until four years after Michelangelo's
death. It has perhaps exerted a wider influence than any other church
of the last four hundred years (fig. 61). Giacomo Vignola (1507-73),
the architect, following probably Michelangelo's ideas, combines
in,his ground plan the central scheme of the Renaissance with the
longitudinal scheme of the Middle Ages—an eminently character-
istic fact. The combination as such is not new. Albert! had done the
same a hundred years before at S. Andrea in Mantua (fig. 50). The
facade too (fig. 62) seems to take up a theme that Alberti had con-
ceived. The problem for architects of the Renaissance, and since the
Renaissance, was how to project the dimensions of tall nave and
lower aisles on to the exterior without abandoning the orders of
n*