Poetry.—During his later years the long-pent human elements of fervour and tenderness in Michelangelo's nature had found utterance such as they had never found before. He had occasion ally practised poetry in youth, and there are signs of some transient love-passages during his life at Bologna. But it was not until towards his sixtieth year that the springs of feeling were fairly opened in the heart of this solitary, this masterful and stern, life-wearied and labour-hardened man. About we find him beginning to address impassioned sonnets—of which the sentiment is curiously comparable to that expressed in some of Shakespeare's—to a beautiful and gifted youth, the young Roman noble Tommaso Cavalieri. Soon afterwards he made the acquaintance of the pious, accomplished and high-souled lady, Vittoria Colonna, widow of the Marquess Pescara. For ten years until her death, which happened in 1547, her friendship was the great solace of Michelangelo's life. On her, in all loyalty and reverence, he poured out all the treasures of his mind and all his imprisoned powers of tenderness and devotion. She was the chief inspirer of his poetry—of which, along with her praises, the main themes are the Christian religion, the joys of Platonic love, and the power and mysteries of art. Michelangelo's poetical style is strenuous and concentrated like the man. He wrote with labour and much self-correction; we seem to feel him flinging himself on the material of language with the same overwhelming energy and vehemence with which contemporaries describe him as flinging himself on the material of marble—the same impetuosity of temperament combined with the same fierce desire of per fection, but with far less either of innate instinct for the material or of trained mastery over its difficulties.
Last Years: Architecture—And so the mighty sculptor, painter and poet reached old age. An infirmity which settled on him in 1544, and the death of Vittoria Colonna in 1547, left him broken in health and heart. But his strength held on for many a
year longer yet. His father and brothers were dead, and his family sentiment concentrated itself on a nephew, Leonardo, to whom he showed unremitting practical kindness, coupled with his usual suspiciousness and fitfulness of temper. During the last years of his life he was much employed in the fourth art in which he excelled—that of architecture. A succession of popes demanded his services for the embellishment of Rome. Between 1536 and 1546 he was engaged on plans for the rearrangement and recon struction of the great group of buildings on the Capitol—plans which were only partially and imperfectly carried out during his lifetime and after his death. For Paul III. he finished the palace called after the name of the pope's family the Farnese. On the death of Antonio da San Gallo he succeeded to the onerous and coveted office of chief architect of St. Peter's church, for which he remodelled all the designs, living to see some of the main features, including the supports and lower portion of the great central dome, carried out in spite of all obstacles, according to his plans. The dome as it stands is his most conspicuous and one of his noblest monuments: the body of the church was completed in a manner quite different from his devising. Other great archi tectural tasks on which he was engaged were the reconstruction of the Porta Pia, and the conversion of a portion of the baths of Diocletian into the church of Sta. Maria degli Angeli; the great cloister with its hundred columns, now used as the Museo delle Terme, is the only part of this reconstruction which remains as he designed it. At length, in the midst of these vast schemes and responsibilities, the heroic old man's last remains of strength gave way. He died on the threshold of his ninetieth year, on Feb. 18, 1564.
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