Art: Out of the Night

The Night that here thou seest, in

graceful guise Thus sleeping, by an Angel's hand was

carved In this pure stone; but sleeping, still

she lives. Awake her if thou doubtest, and she'll

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The poet, an obscure contemporary of Michelangelo's, was trying to describe one of the seven figures which the sculptor had carved for the Medici Chapel in Florence's Church of San Lorenzo. Charles de Tolnay, a Michelangelo scholar and member of Princeton's highbrow Institute for Advanced Study, has done much better. In a newly published book of bold erudition (The Medici Chapel; Princeton University Press, $20) De Tolnay interprets the entire chapel in the light of a single theme. Deep inside De Tolnay's brier patch of facts and shrewd guesses lies new evidence that Michelangelo, like all great artists, was a genius in mind and spirit as well as in eye and hand.

Michelangelo began work on the chapel in 1520, when he was 45. He had finished the Sistine Ceiling, and the 20 months spent painting on his back had half blinded him (for some time he could read letters only by holding them over his head). The Sistine Ceiling had been a hymn to creation; the Medici Chapel, De Tolnay believes, was to be a more somber hymn to immortality. Michelangelo failed to finish it. After 14 years of constantly interrupted work, the master left Florence to paint the Last Judgment for Pope Paul III in Rome, and never got home again.

Most sightseers remember the chapel as a high room lined with miscellaneous sculpture. Michelangelo, according to De Tolnay, had hoped it would be seen quite differently, as "an abbreviated image of the universe, with its spheres hierarchically ranged one above the other."

Four from Hades. The lowest zone, next the floor, is Hades, where lie the sepulchers of Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici (they were to be flanked by four figures representing the rivers of Hades, which Michelangelo never got around to). Lorenzo's tomb supports the famed outstretched figures of Dawn and Dusk, and atop Giuliano's sprawl Day and Night. Symbolizing earthly life, the stone nudes lie heavy as lead.

Sitting above them—beyond space and time—are the souls of the two dead

Dukes. This was a radical notion. "In all earlier sepulchral monuments," De Tolnay says, "the images of the dead were represented as outstretched on the sarcophagi."

The sculptor dressed his dukes in marble armor; at first glance, they look like Roman emperors. But their gentle, dreamy expressions and gestures are not a bit Roman. They seem powerless and wise, but not with earthly knowledge. Giuliano seems to be "held upright by the magic of the Madonna at whom he is looking." The Virgin, with the Child at her breast, sits at the center of the chapel's end wall. She is the focal point around which Michelangelo's half-classical and half-Christian little universe is clustered.

Four in Reply. De Tolnay's interpretation of the Medici Chapel is a contribution to art history, but no one will ever know for sure whether it corresponds to what Michelangelo had in mind. The master himself wrote four lines of poetry about the chapel—an answer to the poet who had praised his Night figure. His poem, speaking in the person of Night (and translated by John Addington Symonds):

Sweet is my sleep, but more to be mere stone,