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Spiritual Science as a Life's Work
GA 63

8 January 1914, Berlin

Translated by E. Goddard

6. Michelangelo

This lecture is to deal with a subject taken from the study of culture and art, and my purpose is to show you how Spiritual Science aims to penetrate to the essence of historical evolution and of the human personalities which find themselves within it.

History nowadays has come to be regarded as a science among the sciences. Nevertheless a very notable book recently published disputes the claim of history to be called a science on the grounds that it is only the concatenation of single events and achievements which cannot recur, at least in that particular form, a second or third time. The author argues as follows: If we have a number of facts, say about a raindrop, we can deduce laws which the raindrop obeys—that is, we can make a scientific statement because other raindrops follow the same laws; and this we can also do in the world which does in some way repeat itself. Historical facts on the other hand are unique; we can recount them but we cannot base on them anything that could be truly called a science.—Now if we accept the ideas and concepts which are nowadays regarded as scientific, we shall have to admit that our author is right. But it is very different if we look at history in the light which Lessing in his day tried to do in his “Education of the Human Race”; as an evolution, an upward movement of the whole of humanity in which the effective influences passing from one epoch to another, are the souls of human beings. Sense and meaning come into human history as soon as we cease looking at it just as a series of events occurring in some sort of sequence and never repeating themselves, and begin to believe that the souls of human beings continue their existence in successive earth lives, and that what influenced them in one life is carried over into the spiritual world and there made fruitful in the period between death and a new birth until it appears in a new life: so that a real progress and development is possible in the succession of historical events. In this way we can see a meaning in the study of single epochs; their significance lies in the new experiences which souls were unable to have at the age in which they lived but which they can now experience and carry over once more into later epochs. In this way and thanks to Spiritual Science we can once again regard history as a science.

Perhaps one of the best ways to reach some notion of such an evolution of human history—not in abstract theory but appealing to the feelings—is to study the great epochs of art and the great artists. We shall never be convinced of the reality of man's repeated lives on earth by any abstract argument. But if we seriously observe life and try by every means to understand the secrets of our existence, we shall find ourselves becoming gradually more and more convinced of the fact of repeated earth lives, the more we study reality as a whole. I hope to contribute something towards such a study by trying to show you the place which Michelangelo holds in the spiritual life of the West.

If we look at this spiritual life of the West and indeed of the whole of humanity in the light of this conception of repeated earth lives we shall soon come to see a real significance in such an evolution of man, for each successive epoch differs from the earlier one and human souls have correspondingly different experiences. Unless we take a very shortsighted view of human history, we cannot accept the notion that the human soul has been more or less what it is today since first it rose above the animal. If we look a little more deeply into earlier periods of history and especially if with the help of Spiritual Science we look at pre-Christian times, we shall find that the whole basic tone and quality, the whole constitution of the human soul was different in those earlier periods and has changed considerably in the course of human history, that in fact the structure of the soul has been perpetually changing in the successive epochs of human history. We shall see this particularly significantly if we take an artist like Michelangelo in the Sixteenth Century and study him in relation to artists of earlier ages who worked within the same field. Obviously in such a study we should look at Michelangelo's achievement side by side with that of the Greeks. But as soon as we look beneath the surface we shall see the immense difference there is between the two. In order to recognize this it is necessary to go briefly into the particular way in which Greek sculpture affects us.

It is a pity that a lecture like this cannot be given with lantern slides or other visual aids, though fortunately you can easily get access to first-rate reproductions of the material necessary in any History of Art and see for yourselves in actual detail, what I am describing. When Herman Grimm set about writing his wonderful book on Michelangelo in the 1850's, he could not give any illustrations at all—though the second edition published forty years later was illustrated and thus reveals clearly the secrets of Michelangelo which even Grimm's descriptions in his “Life” could not give. Modern reproductions make it even more possible to reach some insight into the basic ideas and forms which are to be found in the development of art through the ages.

If we let Greek art and especially Greek sculpture work on us, we shall certainly feel that the best of it (much of which may be no longer accessible to us) in the forms in which it appeared, must have spoken to the Greeks like a message from another world. This creation of form was possible to the Greeks because something lived in their souls which did not come to them immediately through their physical senses. They bore within themselves an inner feeling-knowledge of the way in which the human organism is formed. The whole of a Greek's general education contributed to this but it was also important that the Greeks lived at a different epoch of humanity when the soul was more closely interwoven with man's whole organism; for instance, in the movement of the hand they felt the particular angle the hand made with the arm; or they could feel the particular muscle extended by their hand or foot. The Greeks could feel this sort of thing—they could feel and experience how the organic and the soul were related. They had an immediately-felt knowledge of their own organism so that the artist did not need to look at outer nature or external models in order to create his forms. An inner knowledge gave them the understanding of their muscular structure and anatomy, and their inter-relationship. They could permeate their whole organism with their mood of soul which flowered within them. Even what survives to us of Greek sculpture reveals that when the sculptor set his hand to a statue of Zeus, for instance, his soul was permeated with a sort of Zeus feeling. He then knew what inner tensions this feeling could resolve and thus, from within outwards, he could give to matter is appropriate form. He put his soul into matter. It is natural that at the present day we should have no feeling for the very different mode of experience of the Greeks. But, that mode being given, anyone who looks properly at the works of Greek sculpture will perceive that they give expression to what man experienced as the activity of his soul. Greek sculpture in general expresses what lies within the soul. We need not concern ourselves whether this Zeus or this Hera and the rest are gods: that makes artistic study a matter of storytelling. What does matter is the way in which the Greek sculptor worked upon his Zeus or Hera—withdrawn into his life of soul, as we ourselves feel withdrawn when we experience in the organic process of muscular tension the activity of the soul in our organism, and the soul is attuned to their experience. This withdrawing, and this having to go out in order to enter space, to manifest itself in space, is characteristic of the plastic art of Greece. This is a world that strives to reveal itself. This is true also of the larger sculptured groups, at least as late as the “Laocoon”; their purpose is to make us feel something of a world of soul. Around and about us is the rest of the human world, and indeed ourselves; and the work of art has some relation to us only when we direct our soul towards it. Yet this work of art does not belong to the same space, the same world, in which we normally move and hold converse; it remains alien to it.

Suppose now we pass from these Greek sculptures to the “Moses” of Michelangelo. We shall feel compelled to say that no sculptor has ever given expression to the powerful will of Moses as he did. The whole impression is of a leader of his people who fills his people with his own spiritual power and pours his own will over a whole people and remains their leader far beyond his own lifetime. So completely does this Moses diffuse the sense of human power that we are quite ready to accept in it something which is quite unrealistic. The statue as we all know has two horns; but it is by no means sufficient just to say that these are the symbols of Moses' power. If a lesser artist than Michelangelo were to do a sculpture of Moses and give it two horns like this and justify them as symbols of power, we should not admire them because we should not believe in them. Yet Michelangelo sets before us his Moses as representative of his age so completely penetrated with force of will that he can put upon him these extraordinary horns; and we are quite prepared to believe in them. What matters is not what is actually represented but rather that we should believe in all the details of what is represented, even if they are unrealistic.

Now let us turn from Moses to the statue of David; and let us look at him in relation to what we have seen to be true of Greek sculpture. He is shown at that moment when in his heart he becomes fully aware of what lies before him; he is shown grasping his sling at the very moment before he accomplishes his deed. Earlier artists like Donatello (1386–1466) and Verrocchio (1436–1488) who had done a statue of David, had shown him with Goliath's head beneath his feet. Michelangelo chooses the moment when the soul becomes aware of its task, and that moment is given external expression, and we might well believe that the artist had firmly seized hold of some special inner condition of soul. But as with the “Moses,” so with the “David”—that is by no means all, there is something else equally important. Moses might quite easily get up and proceed further: for he exists within our space, and the same space which gives us life gives it to him also. These two statues are removed beyond what is a mere element of soul; they are set within the actual world around us; we should not feel at all surprised if we saw David actually using his sling.

Here is the significant change between the old and the new, and from this point of view Michelangelo is the most significant artist. While the Greeks had created works of art which deny the outer world and produce their effect on our souls as from another world, Michelangelo sets his figures into the same world in which we live; they share our life within that world. With a slight exaggeration we might say that while the statues of the Greek gods breathe only the air of the gods, Michelangelo's breathe the same air as ourselves. This is not just a matter of realism or idealism as we use those clichés: rather we should recognize that Michelangelo is the most important artist who takes his figures away from the realm of the soul and sets them within this earth existence of ours so that they live as real beings among men. Once we have accepted the fact that in the spiritual development of humanity a special task was laid upon Michelangelo, we shall not be surprised to discover that in his earliest youth he displayed the faculties necessary for this task, faculties which he brought with him from the spiritual world. Our scientific geneticists would have difficulty explaining the facts: how he was descended from a family that belonged to citizens of noble extraction but which had fallen on evil days, a family which certainly did not possess any of the qualities needed for the specific task that was to be Michelangelo's. At first it was intended that he should go to school like the others, but he was perpetually drawing and drawing in such a remarkable way that no one could imagine where he got it from. Finally his father sent him to study with Ghirlandaio, but great artist as the latter was the boy could learn nothing from him. Michelangelo's drawing sprang from some self-evident quality of genius. Through having his attention attracted to Michelangelo's drawings Lorenzo de Medici took him into his house and there he spent the three years 1489 to 1492; he had been born in 1475. His first object of search that seemed to him especially important was the relatively insignificant relics of antiquity, of Greek sculpture. But—and this is the characteristic thing—he very soon combined all that he saw, and which made so deep an impression on him, with an energetic and intensive study of anatomy. In his soul he acquired an exact knowledge of the inner structure of the human body. In all his works we can see the effect of these anatomical studies and of the knowledge he had acquired. Before the soul could experience anything or have some particular mood, he found it necessary to know the position of the muscles. So we can see how two currents were flowing together in Michelangelo and were to produce something more than any contemporary talents could create: humanity had now moved forward to a new epoch, and what the Greeks had been able to experience within themselves, by the inner “life sense” which was still active within them, Michelangelo had to acquire through external senses by close observation of outer nature and her structure.

This sort of example can show us how the development of the human soul moves on, how what was impossible for the soul in one epoch becomes possible in another, and how the highest achievement is possible at different times with different means. While he was still quite young, in 1498, Michelangelo attained the wonderful Pieta which we see immediately on our right when we enter St. Peter's. This work still bears traces of the Italian tradition deriving from Cimabue and Giotto it even has still a sort of Byzantine quality. Yet if we note carefully what he actually achieved in the Pieta, we can see how his exact and realistic study of the human body has influenced it. Thus he could create a sculpture which was the equal of the Greek because he had learned to observe externally.

Why had this become necessary? We can see this particularly well in the Pieta if we note how in the progressive development of humanity since the days of the Greeks something quite alien to them had entered in. The natural life sense which the Greeks possessed made it possible for them to reveal almost spontaneously how the human body actually appears in some particular mood. In between the time of the Greeks and the rise of Western Europe we have the world conception which reached its peak in Christianity but which originated in Judaism and still retained to some degree the old command, “Thou shalt not make any graven image of what is spiritual.” I don't know how many people have given much thought to the fact that between the age of the Greeks and the age of Michelangelo there came one in which it really was a fact that no image was to be made. The earliest Christians did not make any pictorial representation of Christ but employed only symbols—the fish symbol, the monogram of Christ. The same had been true of the Jews who had, of course, as one of their Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not make any image of the Lord Thy God.” Yet when we enter the most important chapel of Christendom, the Sistine Chapel in Rome, we see the command disregarded by Michelangelo when, at the height of his creative powers, he painted the Father God on the ceiling of that chapel.

Michelangelo could achieve these new heights of church art only by disregarding that command. But between his time and that of the Greeks there had to be a period of preparation. And so we shall be able to realize that it is not just a false analogy when we say that successive epochs of humanity are like day and night, and that between the day periods there have to be nights during which human faculties pass into a sort of rest state, to appear again later in strengthened form. The achievements of Greek sculpture had to pass through a sort of formative period in sleep, during which even for that the command had to be heeded: “Thou shalt not make any graven image.” Then, however, there follows the day of wakening, in a new form, in Michelangelo. But whereas in nature things reappear in the same form and one day resembles another and the plant its earlier form, the progress of humanity shows this special characteristic that the souls, who carry over their fruits from one epoch to another, undergo at the same time some upward change and metamorphosis. But this rest period of the human faculties has first to occur in this and every other sphere.

Thus after this period during which sculpture rested, there appeared the Christian ideal: an inner quality of soul, a mood of greater inwardness. This is true, for instance of the Pieta in which the youthful mother holds on her lap her dead son; if we compare it with any Greek work of art, we shall see that it could have been created only in an age when the soul had become more inward. There is a marked difference between Michelangelo and the Greek sculptors; he stands at the beginning of the modern age, the age that is of materialism. Man's senses were beginning to be directed outwards so that they could pass through a period in which these senses could reach their highest and intensest development. But there must always be some counterbalance in human evolution. Thus we see in Michelangelo on the one hand an artist who poured his soul forth into the outer world that he might create his figures. On the other hand, that he should not merely create what the senses can see, he employed to the full everything he could assimilate from a period of evolution during which the soul had become more inward. This inner deepening he expressed by external means; he made himself sensitive to what was inward in outer nature. If we look at the dead body of the Christ we can see at once that this is a beautiful human body such as nature would wish to create—and Michelangelo could recreate that. But there is also something further, and indeed in a double aspect: first, the extraordinary peace in death that streams over this body; and second, if we look at the group as a whole—the countenance of the young mother who bears the adult body of her son Jesus Christ on her lap yet seems too young to be in any external sense that man's mother—we receive from the form of the hard stone the feeling that what lies before us in death is the warrant for the external life of the human soul. The deepest secrets and the greatest inwardness are expressed realistically through the natural means which Michelangelo had studied.

When Michelangelo returned from Rome to Florence we can see a remarkable drama unfolding itself. There was an old block of marble from which some earlier sculptor had unsuccessfully sought to hew some figure and which the Council of Florence handed over to Michelangelo to try and make something of. He happened at the moment to be working on his David, so he decided to use this particular block. Now if we follow this work as it proceeded, we shall be able to see how Michelangelo set about his task. His greatness consists largely in a period which was to depend wholly on sense observation, yet he carried over something from those earlier epochs, the life of which he could share, and could thus still have some immediate feeling of what Goethe called the spirit of outer nature.

Here I should like to refer to something which in general receives too little attention. If through Anthroposophy we make our souls once again sensitive to the weaving of imagination, we shall feel when we see a block of marble before us, that something specific should be made from it. It is not without significance that we find among the inhabitants of mountain districts all those stories about enchanted beings which their folk soul devises: when people see a block of stone before them, there is a plastic imagination which tells them that not much would be needed to convert it into an example of some quality of human or animal nature. Each type of stone calls for its own specific form, and each type has its own secrets which the artist must extract from it.

Michelangelo began work on the block and at first made it a sort of image of his thoughts. This was merely the first expression of his ideas, his feelings; as he looked at the stone he felt that thus the hand must lie and thus the foot, and thus everything else. He could, as it were, listen into the secrets hidden in the stone; that after all is what plastic art means. In the end we feel that the block was presented us with what lay hidden within it when everything had been removed that did not really belong to it. An artist of the quality of Michelangelo would never create in bronze or other materials what he did in stone.

For this purpose, however, Michelangelo, because he no longer had the life sense active within himself, had to fall back on what he could get from his anatomical studies. Thanks to his careful studies, and to the fact that he comprehended artistically what came to him from an earlier period, he stands at the opening of the modern age in the same relation to art and nature as science had led to in its own sphere. It is not just a coincidence that Galileo was born on the day that Michelangelo died. Here is a point of view that we should bear in mind, particularly when we are looking at his David.

This then is the characteristic quality of Michelangelo: that he has penetrated to the heart of nature as she showed herself in his times, from one point of view still closely akin to what had gone before but at the same time a growing point for what is to come. If he created Madonnas or some other Christian motif, the reason for this lay in the culture within which he lived—and that is perhaps truer of him than of most other artists. What he brought through his own soul into his times I have been trying to describe, and what we can see in other ways as well. The fundamental trait about Michelangelo's work is that he sets his creations within the same space in which we ourselves stand. Look at his Madonnas; in the earliest phase the child rests wholly on his mother's lap. But Michelangelo moves beyond that phase and puts himself quite realistically in the same space in which we ourselves live. Thus he releases the child from the repose and inner withdrawal; he cannot leave it as a bare expression; he must bring it into motion so that it may seem to live in our world. And if we look at the wonderful ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, on which he has represented so majestically the creation of the world, the Prophets and the Sibyls, and if we let all this produce its effect upon us, we shall find that what really interests us is not the thing actually expressed but the way in which Michelangelo has represented it. We shall feel, for instance, that the foreshortening of the legs, which brings to expression the very nerve of his art, as I have tried to describe it, interests us much more than the content, the story that is described and that could be expounded in various ways.

We need not be surprised then that Michelangelo sets himself the task, supported to begin with by the Pope, Julius II, to create something which would be directly associated with the life of his time, in a different way, however, from that in which Zeus or Hera or Apollo even in the form of the Apollo Belvedere were related to the Greek world. These, although they were the creation of the Greek world, belong to a space of their own and reveal that space. Michelangelo wanted to create a truly gigantic work but wanted also to pour into it the whole inner development, the basic character and fundamental nature of his times. Now to Michelangelo and many of his contemporaries, Pope Julius II, who loved to compare himself to St. Paul, seemed the mighty incorporation of his age; he was, and seemed to himself to be, the great master of his times. When a man holds such a place in his times, he has some special relation to the soul of others who affect them; and this whole stream of culture, the inmost essence of the times and all they signified, represented in one man, was to flow together and be made immortal in the gigantic monument of Pope Julius II. The monument was to include not only the Pope but Moses and St. Paul, and other figures that influence events and in the truest sense direct the times. The very stone was to carry to later ages the living message so that generations to come might look at this monument and see in it the direct picture on earth of the course and culture of the times of Michelangelo. A truly gigantic task; and we should not be surprised that the man who was bold enough to contemplate it aroused the awe of his contemporaries and was called by Pope Leo X “Il Terribile.”

Thus Michelangelo returned to Rome in 1505 to discuss with Julius II the plans for his tomb, and he soon began on the preliminaries of the work. But petty jealousies brought it to a standstill and the Pope transferred his interests from the tomb to St. Peter's, the architect of which, Bramante, is said to have goaded him on because he feared the artistic greatness of Michelangelo. So Michelangelo had the bitter experience of being forbidden the Pope's presence though the Pope had summoned him to Rome. In fact, he was actually driven out and had to flee from Rome, only returning under a special safe conduct from the Pope.

Back in Rome he had to set about his new task, the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; a task for which he had been commissioned as some compensation for the stopping of work on the tomb. Now though he had done a good deal of painting, he did not feel himself really to be a painter; nor did he regard himself as sufficiently prepared for his work. It was therefore with a sorrowing heart at having to give up work on the tomb, even if not with actual dislike, that he tackled the task which, as he said himself, was outside his own sphere but which kept him busy for the four years from 1508 to 1512.

Let us keep in mind what he has to tell us himself out of the depth of a sorrowing heart about this period of his life when he was at work on the ceiling—his head twisted backwards and his eyes distorted upwards to such an extent that months after the work was completed, he could read or study drawings only if he held the paper above his head. In addition, he did not receive the payments due to him and he lived in perpetual anxiety for his family in Florence whom he supported with every penny he could save. Under conditions like this he created one of the greatest works of art the world has seen, the noblest pattern that could be devised by the Christian world of the time. He sought to represent the whole story of man's evolution from the creation of the world to its highest point in the coming of Christ to earth and the Mystery of Golgotha. He successfully transferred from his sculpture to his painting the vital creative principle which informed his whole work. When we turn our gaze upwards to the ceiling, we really do feel as if God the Father were surging through the still chaotic space, and by His Word marvelously creating the world. But this space and this figure in all its details down to its flying hair, its glance and its gesture, all are part of the world in which we ourselves stand. We live together with this God the Father; we feel His creative Word surging through the world.

The way in which traditions from the past still echo in the work of Michelangelo can be seen particularly in his “Creation of Adam.” Michelangelo paints this with God the Father surging through space with hand outstretched, and with this hand touching that of the still-sleeping Adam. We can observe how sleep is gradually receding by the ray of light which passes from the index finger of God to that of Adam, who can be seen waking out of a sort of world existence into that of man. Within his cloud-like raiment which seems to be held aloft by the space-ordering powers, God the Father conceals the figure of a young woman just reaching maturity; she stands forth among the other Angel figures turning her curious glance to the just-waking Adam. According to the Bible Adam was first created and Eve created out of him but, for Michelangelo's Adam, Eve is brought forth from past ages by God the Father who conceals her in His raiment. Michelangelo can see more deeply than tradition could tell him into the secrets of creation; and what he saw is confirmed by the investigations of Spiritual Science into the male and female principles.

Let us now pass to the pictures of the Prophets and Sibyls, those beings who proclaim to man what is to come in the Christ-Impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha. Here again what matters is not the narrative element in the pictures but the purely artistic way in which Michelangelo has shaped these Jewish Prophets. All of them as they are seated there—one of them bending in deep thought over a book, another in meditation, a third perhaps in anger—point in the one direction which will only become clear to us if we turn our gaze towards the Sibyls.1See Rudolf Steiner, Christ in the Spiritual World: The Search for the Holy Grail and The Four Sacrifices of Christ. These Sibyls are very peculiar figures and modern Christianity will have nothing to do with these heralds of the Mystery of Golgotha. What do they really signify?

In the Sixth Century B.C. philosophy came to birth, and unless we spin fantasies like Deussen we cannot really speak of the philosophy of any earlier times. Philosophy began in Ionia, and it was there that human thinking first tried to comprehend the world through its own powers. There we have the first instance of man reflecting about his own thought which led later to the immense developments in Plato and Aristotle. These Sibyls look like a sort of shadow of Aristotle, the man who raised thinking to the highest level of clarity. The first of them appear in Ionia: subconscious, dreamlike, mediumistic forces of the soul surge through them; they put into words, though often in confused form, what is given to them. Generally it is oracular sayings which they utter; often little more intelligible than we get from modern mediums. But there is something further in their utterances; they are pointers to the Christ Event and we have to take them just as seriously as we do, though from a different point of view, the utterances of the Jewish Prophets. How did the Sibyls come to make these utterances? The investigations of Spiritual Science show that the forces of the Sibyls come actually from the forces of the earth spirits which are directly related to the subconscious depths of the human soul. If we can feel what Goethe called the “spirits of bodies,” we shall be sensitive to the spirit surging in the wind, in the waters, in everything elemental. It was this spirit of bodies, spirit at its lowest level, the spirit nevertheless, which pointed the way to the Mystery of Golgotha, which possessed the Sibyls. The Prophets opposed this spirit. They sought to attain their purposes only by actual thinking by the conscious ego. They rejected everything that was subconscious or Sibyl-like, even if it foretold the highest things. Sibyls and Prophets stand over against each other like the North and South Poles—the Sibyls inspired by the spirit of earth, the Prophets by the cosmic spirit which lives not in the subconscious but in those experiences of the soul which are fully conscious. It was for this reason that the men who have written for us the story of Christ emphasized so strongly how He drove out the demons from those within whom the sibylline forces still worked: that is the after-effect of the Prophets whose aim it was to use their powers of reflection on everything that was higher than the sibylline. For this reason also, Christ Jesus was so insistent that these sibylline forces which showed themselves as demonic beings should be driven out.

Thus we have both the prophetic and the sibylline element proclaiming to us the Christ-impulse; that is the content, the theme of Michelangelo's work. How does he handle it? Let us take note of the Sibyls, and first the Persian. She holds a book immediately before her eyes so that she may foretell the future from what the book says; and she seems to be wholly possessed by lower elemental forces. In the case of the Erythrean Sibyl we can see from her countenance how forces live within her which are related to the spiritual evolution of humanity, but which concern the subconscious, not the fully conscious forces of the soul. A boy with a torch is lighting a lamp; every one of this Sibyl's movements expresses her elemental quality. The Delphic Sibyl stretches her hand towards a scroll; the wind sweeps through her and her raiment and hair flutter; she is directly bound up with the elemental forces of the earth which have gripped her soul so that she can utter her prophecies. In this way Michelangelo places the Sibyls within the realms of actual existence within which we live ourselves, and he expresses all this in external forms. If we then pass to the Cumaean Sybil with her opened lips and finally to the Libyan, we see in them, though transformed, what we must call the pagan proclamation of the Christ Impulse.

In the facial expression of the Prophets, in the movements and emotional turmoil of many of them, in the manner in which their eye reads as though it could never again leave the page—in all this we can see how they seize upon the truths which exist in eternity. We could not conceive of anything represented thus with artistic necessity that could use external forms so directly to express what was wanted as this juxtaposition of Prophets and Sibyls. We can read for ourselves, in these ceiling paintings, how the Christ-impulse was foretold. The whole of pre-Christian history is here put before our eyes—the ancestors of Mary, shown despite their number in majestic variation, and expressing always the character of the epoch through one of them.

How did Christ come into the world? And how did the world develop so that all human history until the coming of Christ could occur within it? The noblest answer that could be given in pictures is here on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Michelangelo hoped that after completing his task here he would be able to continue work on the Julius monument. But again nothing came of it for years and he was held up by the multifarious jobs to which in the meantime he had to apply himself. Of them we need not say anything here; but we should note the following—When developments at Rome prevented him from continuing with the monument, once again he was given a task of painting to do. He was to paint the two end walls of the Sistine Chapel. One he did complete, the Last Judgment. But what we can see there today in Rome is by no means what Michelangelo painted. Not only is the wall darkened by the smoke of the hundreds of candles used for the Mass, so that the original freshness of color has long since vanished, but even in his lifetime this mighty work was overpainted and spoiled by inferior artists who used the most appalling mixtures of paints and shading to clothe some of the too many figures which Michelangelo had painted naked. Yet in spite of all, we can see for ourselves how Michelangelo, the artist whose task it was to make the transition to the age of realism, created his figures within the same space in which we live. If we look at the portrait of “Christ as Judge of the World,” He will inevitably remind us much of Jupiter and Apollo. Herman Grimm, who copied this figure at close quarters, repeatedly stressed the likeness between this head and the Apollo Belvedere. We should remember that when Michelangelo came to Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century the “Laocoon”, the “Hercules Torso” and other statues, had just been dug up (1506) and these survivals of antiquity made a deep impression on him, though he permeated everything that he did with what we can see to be his own creative principle. Thus it comes about that what men in general felt about the fate of the human soul in its earthly body, what they called the destiny of the Blessed and the Damned, can be seen in Michelangelo's painting growing out into space. If we look at it first through half-closed eyes we can see the cloud forms which appear as natural as those of real clouds. The Christ figure and the Angels with trumpets emerge quite naturally, so also do the souls of whom some are led into blessedness, others thrust down into hell. Michelangelo puts before us the deepest secrets of his work and reveals to us the hidden destiny of the human soul growing forth from what we ourselves know and what our senses show us.

Michelangelo was in actual fact deeply rooted in his own age. Those of you who can remember how I tried to represent Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael will have noticed how very differently I spoke of them. Unlike them, Michelangelo was rooted in what I have called the principle of his time.

He was nearly 90 when in 1564 he died. Every period of man's life can be creative; it depends only on what he can extract from it. His personality is closely related to what he has to give to the world. How different was Raphael who died in his middle thirties, just the age when the artist, more than other types, is doing work which will bear his own personal stamp. It is for this reason that we think of Raphael as a sort of revelation of super-sensible powers; there is nothing really personal that flows into his work. That is characteristic of him. Michelangelo is just the opposite; in every fiber of his work we see the color of his personality. Raphael wholly impersonal—Michelangelo wholly personal. If we try to judge by some set pattern as is so common with modern artists we shall never get the individual qualities of individual artists; we shall prefer one of them to the other, whereas both of them and Leonardo as well, have to be judged each by his own measure. Michelangelo's special quality is that in all his works, whether he worked in stone or in color, we find a peculiar artistic quality which was the expression of his time; hence the all-embracing character of his work which gives universal expression to what lives in him.

In order to make clear the way in which the spirit of Michelangelo developed I want to say a word about his work as builder and architect and to refer especially to what is his greatest achievement, that remarkable work of artistic mechanics, the Dome of St. Peter's at Rome, of which the present form is due really to him. He did not live to see it completed and died even before the drum was finished. But we possess sketches and drawings, and also the wooden model of the dome which was made with the greatest care and under his supervision from a clay model of his own construction. This dome was to express what in the end is the truly architectural problem of space; it was to enclose quite naturally the space within which a congregation of believers might meet. His feeling for space, his ability to transfer his artistic idea into the same world in which we live, helped him to think out in this wonderful way the architectural mechanics of space.

In Michelangelo we have a spirit who helped human evolution on its way because he had a maturity of soul which enabled him to imprint on the world of space and matter significant facts from the spiritual world. He stood wholly in the great current of his times yet his own inmost quality was not fully understood. A friend once wrote to him that even the Pope feared him; and yet in his soul there lived all the greatness of Christian impulses which flowed into his work. While he felt himself at one with the great Christian impulses he yet lived at the dawn of a later epoch—closely though it was still connected with earlier ages. The content of older Christian impulses still affected his soul and out of that he created something which in its form and artistic method was already part of the ties in which we ourselves live. Hence comes the mood of the poem which he wrote—probably during his last days as he looked back over his life—and which makes it clear what our relation is to him, and how we should allow his influence over us to work:

Now hath my life across a stormy sea
like a frail barque reached that wide port where all
are hidden, ere the final reckoning fall
of good and evil for eternity.

Now know I well how that fond phantasy,
which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
is that which all men seek unwillingly.

Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed
what are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
my soul that turns to His great Love on high
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.

(Translation by J. Addington Symonds)

Michelangelo was a great poet also, and the poems of his which survive show the same spirit which we have found in his sculpture and painting. The last three lines of this sonnet make it clear that he could never be at ease in the world, and that was fundamentally true of him all his life. He was a sort of hybrid, still part of the old but already living within the new. This is particularly evident in that work which he carried out at the instigation of one of the Popes: the tombs of Giuliani and Lorenzo dei Medici. It is not merely that the chief figures show us Michelangelo as we have come to know him—one of the Medici musing, the other vigorous of will, both at each moment ready to carry out what Michelangelo has set within them. There is something else very significant in this chapel: the four allegorical figures, arranged two and two: Day and Night, Dawn and Twilight. I have often gazed at them; in fact they are one of the things which by a sort of spiritual compulsion I always look at longest when I have had the privilege of being in Florence. These figures are not mere allegories without force and without vitality. Use every means that Spiritual Science gives you to look at them and think about them; then if we remember that what anthroposophy calls the ego and the astral body leave the physical and etheric bodies at night, and if we ask ourselves what qualities and gesture of the etheric body we should select to represent plastically the truth which Spiritual Science tells us—how, that is, we should picture the physical body of the sleeping human being if we really feel him to be what Spiritual Science describes him as being—we know that he should be represented in the form which Michelangelo has given to “Night”. It is not just a symbol of night but the true spiritual reality of man as he really is in sleep which we have before us in this female figure. Thus Michelangelo, who knew so well how to set the figures in his works within the same space in which we ourselves stand, was also well aware what it means if the soul and spirit leaves man's physical body but leave it with life still within it. If we also study the other individual members of the human being and then look at the other figures in the tomb, we shall see how closely they run parallel with what I once called spiritual chemistry.

Michelangelo stands at the beginning of the age whose task it was to trace out the inner qualities, especially those that exist within Christianity, if we understand it more inwardly and in the present age see how the human soul is to be found within the human ego as Anthroposophy teaches, in close relation with the soul which moves and surges through the world. We shall be very much moved if we picture Michelangelo shut way by himself in the Medici Chapel, working in the night alone till he was physically exhausted, yet with the strength that enabled him to carry out for many years afterwards all those other great works of his in Rome; and if we also realise that the forces were already active in him which we in our turn seek through spiritual science. That is why we feel him to be so closely akin to us - most closely perhaps if we sink ourselves as deeply as possible into these four realistic figures; for in them he showed how the spiritual in man is as much part of our life and being as he had done in earlier years with the figures of his Moses and David, or with the colour and form of his paintings in the Sistine Chapel.

Spiritual Science is always closely in harmony with the highest striving and hopes of those spirits among humanity who are themselves closest to true spiritual being and working. That is supremely the case with Michelangelo. If we start from this standpoint and try to get as close to his soul as we can, we shall feel that a soul like his cannot help feeling that it enters only once into earthly evolution and cannot carry the fruits of its life over into the future of human evolution. This transition-point had to be passed before the doctrine of reincarnation could be revived, a doctrine which men of today are ripe enough to accept if only they are willing. So let us look, once more at Michelangelo and observe him carefully, and see how although he bears clearly within himself the marks of the age in which we are living, yet he could not master the process of the world's evolution to which he had himself contributed so much.

Now hath my life across a stormy sea
like a frail barque reached that wide port where all
are hidden, ere the final reckoning fall
of good and evil for eternity.

Now know I well how that fond phantasy,
which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
is that which all men seek unwillingly.

Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed
what are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
my soul that turns to His great Love on high
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.

And yet we have the assurance which anthroposophy gives us: that nothing can really be destroyed which has been so significantly granted to the development of humanity as happened through Michelangelo, but that the fruits of what has been granted will continue active in further lives of so unique an individual as he was, and that the earth can never lose what has once been imprinted upon it. Even if the present age does not understand the doctrine of repeated earth lives any more than his contemporaries understood Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistine Chapel; even if it thinks the doctrine ridiculous or fantastic, it is just the greatest spirits that teach us most vividly how the meaning of life is to be found when we observe repeated earth lives and transfer into ever new ages what has been experienced in older epochs of mankind. And if Goethe once said that Nature had invented death in order that she might have so much life, spiritual science should add that not only was it to have life but to have it ever more richly and abundantly. This is the only thought we may find worthy to be set side by side with the thoughts which arise naturally in us when we gaze on the works of an artist like Michelangelo.

Michelangelo und Seine Zeit vom Gesichtspunkte der Geisteswissenschaft

Der heutige Vortrag soll gewissermaßen in den Vorträgen dieses Winterzyklus eine Episode bilden. Er soll dies in ähnlicher Weise, wie die Vorträge des vorjährigen Zyklus über Leonardo da Vinci und über Raffael. Mein Ziel gerade mit einem solchen episodischen Vortrage aus dem Gebiete der Kultur- oder Kunstwissenschaft ist, zu zeigen, wie die Geisteswissenschaft einzudringen versucht in das Wesen des geschichtlichen Werdens und der darin stehenden menschlichen Persönlichkeiten. Gerade beim heutigen Vortrage werde ich Sie bitten, zu beachten, daß nach der Natur der Sache, da Geisteswissenschaft heute in gewisser Weise erst im Entstehen ist, auch mit einem solchen Vortrage ein Anfangsversuch gemacht werden muß.

Geschichte gilt in unserer Zeit, so wie die anderen Wissenschaften, als eine wirkliche Wissenschaft. Dennoch bestreitet ein sehr beachtenswertes Buch der Gegenwart der Geschichte das Recht, sich eine Wissenschaft zu nennen, und zwar aus dem Grunde, weil die Geschichte doch nur eine Zusammenstellung von einzelnen Ereignissen und Tatsachen sei, die in der Art, wie sie uns in der Geschichte entgegentreten, nicht ein zweites oder drittes Mal da sind; so daß ein geistreicher Mann der Gegenwart, der den wissenschaftlichen Charakter der Geschichte eben bekämpft, sagt: Wenn man irgend etwas weiß über einen Regentropfen, so kann man nach den Gesetzen, denen er folgt, etwas Wissenschaftliches darüber sagen, weil die anderen Regentropfen denselben Gesetzen folgen. So kann man das bei jedem Käfer tun und bei allem, was gewissermaßen sich wiederholend der Welt angehört. Die geschichtlichen Tatsachen stehen einzeln für sich da; man kann sie erzählen, man kann aber nichts auf sie begründen, was im wahren Sinne des Wortes Wissenschaft genannt werden könnte. — Wenn man jene Begriffe und Ideen nimmt, welche man heute wissenschaftlich nennt, von denen aus man Wissenschaft beurteilt, so muß man eigentlich dem Manne recht geben. Anders stellt sich die Sache, wenn geschichtliche Betrachtung in dem Sinne genommen wird, wie das öfter hier angedeutet worden ist, und wofür im Grunde genommen kein Geringerer als Lessing der Bannerträger der neueren Zeit ist. Ich habe schon darauf hingewiesen, wie auch Lessing die Geschichte als eine Entwickelung, oder sagen wir vielleicht heute als ein Aufwärtssteigen der ganzen Menschheit in der Weise betrachtet, daß dasjenige, was von Epoche zu Epoche hinüberwirkt, die menschlichen Seelen selber sind. Sinn und Zusammenhang kommt in dem Augenblicke in die Geschichte, wo wir nicht mehr nötig haben, sie bloß als eine Summe von hintereinanderfolgenden Ereignissen anzusehen, die sich nicht wiederholen, sondern wo wir Geschichte so ansehen können, daß sich die Seelen in den aufeinanderfolgenden Erdenleben wieder und wieder ausleben, so daß dasjenige, was in alten Zeiten auf die Seelen gewirkt hat, von diesen Seelen herübergetragen wird, zwischen dem Tode und einer neuen Geburt hindurchgeht durch die geistige Welt und dort befruchtet wird, um dann in einem neuen Erdenleben so zu erscheinen, daß wirklich Fortschritt, Entwickelung in der Aufeinanderfolge der geschichtlichen Ereignisse möglich ist. So wird Geschichte durch die Geisteswissenschaft wieder eine Wissenschaft — nicht weil sich in ihr die Gesetze so wiederholen wie in der äußeren Natur, sondern weil wir Geschichte als das anschauen dürfen, was an die menschlichen Seelen in den aufeinanderfolgenden Leben von Epoche zu Epoche herantritt, so daß in der Tat nicht die Gesetze, wohl aber die Seelen, die ihr Leben wiederholen, immer wieder in das Leben eintreten. Dann aber wird die Betrachtung der Epochen bedeutungsvoll; dann erklärt sich uns der Charakter einer Epoche als bedeutsam für das, was Seelen, die aus früheren Epochen herüberkommen, Neues erleben können, das sie früher nicht haben erleben können, und das sie nun wieder hinübertragen in spätere Epochen.

Ich möchte sagen: vielleicht nicht theoretisch-abstrakt, aber empfindungsgemäß durch ideell-künstlerische Betrachtung kann dem Menschen die Überzeugung von einem solchen Verlaufe der Menschheitsgeschichte entgegentreten, wenn er die großen Epochen der Kunstentwickelung und die großen Künstler in ihrer Entwickelung betrachtet. Eine solche Überzeugung, wie diejenige ist von, der Wiederkehr der Seele, von dem vollständigen Leben des Menschen, das so verläuft, daß wir zu unterscheiden haben einen Teil des Daseins zwischen Geburt und Tod und jenen anderen Teil zwischen dem Tode und einer neuen Geburt in der geistigen Welt; die Überzeugung von diesen wiederholten Erdenleben ist nicht durch eine irgendwie abstrakte Betrachtung zu gewinnen. Wer sich aber auf die Betrachtung des Lebens einläßt, wer von überallher sich Rechenschaft zu geben versucht über die Geheimnisse des Daseins, der wird finden, daß — wie gesagt nicht mit tumultuarischem Schritt — auf einmal ihm diese Überzeugung kommen kann, daß aber in der Seele diese Überzeugung von den wiederholten Erdenleben sich immer mehr und mehr herausbilden muß, je mehr man die Wirklichkeit in ihrer Ganzheit betrachtet. Ein solches Kapitel zur Betrachtung der Wirklichkeit möchte ich herantragen, gleichsam jedem selbst überlassend, daraus die Konsequenzen zu ziehen, indem heute der Versuch gemacht werden soll, die Art zu betrachten, wie sich Michelangelo in das abendländische Geistesleben hineinstellt.

Wenn wir dieses abendländische Geistesleben, wenn wir überhaupt das gesamte Geistesleben der Menschheit von dem Gesichtspunkte der wiederholten Erdenleben aus ins Auge fassen, dann müssen wir uns sagen: Es hat seinen guten Sinn in dieser Menschheitsentwickelung, daß die aufeinanderfolgenden Epochen grundverschieden sind, daß die Seelen in diesen Epochen immer Verschiedenes und Verschiedenes erleben. Nur wer recht kurzsinnig die Menschheitsgeschichte überblickt, kann sich der Ansicht hingeben, daß diese Menschenseele, so wie sie heute ist, eigentlich immer gewesen ist, seit sie sich mehr oder weniger von der Tierheit erhoben habe. Wer tiefer eingeht auf die Zeiten älterer Geschichte, wer namentlich mit den Mitteln der Geisteswissenschaft selber sich den vorchristlichen Zeiten nähert, der findet, daß die ganze Grundstimmung und Veranlagung, die Verfassung der Menschenseele in älteren Zeiten eine andere war und sich im Laufe der Menschheitsentwickelung bis in unsere Zeiten wesentlich geändert hat, so daß die Konfiguration der Seele in den aufeinanderfolgenden Zeiten der Menschheitsentwickelung immer eine andere geworden ist. So etwas tritt uns aber bedeutsam entgegen, wenn wir einen so signifikanten Künstler wie Michelangelo in seiner Zeit, im sechzehnten Jahrhundert, nehmen und ihn etwa zusammenstellen mit Künstlern, die in früheren Menschheitsepochen auf einem dem seinigen ähnlichen Gebiete Ähnliches geleistet haben. Stellt sich uns doch wie von selbst nebeneinander in der geschichtlichen Betrachtung die griechische Bildhauerkunst und das, was uns durch Michelangelo gegeben ist. Aber für den, der genauer auf das eingeht, um was es sich dabei handelt, zeigt sich in der Betrachtung auch desjenigen, was nur historisch da ist, ein gewaltiger Unterschied von der griechischen Bildhauerkunst gegenüber den Schöpfungen Michelangelos. Dazu ist notwendig, daß wir uns kurz auf die besondere Art- und Weise einlassen, die heute nur noch wenig bemerkt wird, wie eigentlich griechische Bildhauerkunst auf uns wirken kann.

Es ist ja recht bedauerlich, daß ein solcher Vortrag nicht mit Lichtbildern oder anderen Hilfsmitteln gehalten werden kann; allein was den Inhalt der Kunstentwickelung bildet, das haben wir ja heute schon in so ausgezeichneten Reproduktionen zahlreicher Werke vorhanden, daß es jedem leicht ist, sich einen Einblick, auch durch das Bild, in dasjenige zu verschaffen, was ich mir erlauben werde heute auszuführen. — Als Herman Grimm in den fünfziger Jahren des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts daran ging, sein so wunderbares Werk über Michelangelo zu schreiben, konnte er gar nicht daran denken, sein Werk durch Illustrationen zu bereichern, während es, als es dann vierzig Jahre später wiedererschien, mit Illustrationen ausgestattet worden ist, wodurch es möglich war, daß sich, man kann ohne Übertreibung schon sagen, unerhörte Geheimnisse über Michelangelo enthüllen konnten, die man nicht gewinnen kann aus dem, was man früher bloß aus der Darstellung des «Lebens Michelangelos» von Herman Grimm haben konnte. Die Photographie, der Lichtdruck haben in den letzten Jahrzehnten einen solchen Fortschritt erfahren, daß es heute wirklich zum wahren Seelenheil der Menschheit möglich ist, sich einen Einblick zu verschaffen wenigstens in das, was als die Ideenkonfiguration, als Formkonfiguration und dergleichen in der Kunstentwickelung durch die Zeiten geht.

Wenn man die griechische Kunst, die Skulptur auf sich. wirken läßt, so muß man sagen: Sie wirkt so auf uns, daß wir uns der Empfindung nicht entschlagen können, das. Beste, das vielleicht heute gar nicht einmal mehr Vorhandene der griechischen Bildnerkunst muß zu den Menschen gesprochen haben wie die Kunde aus einer anderen Welt. Nicht etwa meine ich das Äußerliche - denn ich will keine unkünstlerische Betrachtung anstellen —, daß die Griechen zumeist Götter, Götterhandlungen, übermenschliche Handlungen gebildet haben. Nicht das, nicht den Inhalt der Kunst meine ich, sondern das Künstlerische der Kunst selber, die Formgebung. Wie ist sie erfolgt? So ist sie erfolgt, daß der Grieche in seiner Seele etwas trug, was er nicht unmittelbar durch die äußeren Sinne aus der Natur entnommen hat. Der Grieche trug in sich ein inneres fühlendes Wissen von der Art und Weise, wie ein menschlicher Organismus gestaltet ist. Dazu trug alles bei, was Griechenland zur Erziehung der Menschenseele hatte; dazu trug aber auch bei, daß die Griechen in einer anderen Epoche der Menschheitsgeschichte lebten, in welcher sich die Seele mit ihrem Organismus noch innig verwachsen fühlte, wo der Mensch in ganz anderer Weise gefühlt hat: Jetzt bewegst du deine Hand, jetzt macht deine Hand, dein Arm, einen spitzen Winkel, jetzt einen rechten, jetzt einen stumpfen Winkel; jetzt streckt deine Hand oder dein Bein diesen oder jenen Muskel. Dieses In-sich-Sein in der Seele, dieses Sichdurchdringen, dieses Sichdurchfühlen des Organischen mit der Seele - das ist griechisches Fühlen, griechisches Empfinden. Daher muß man sagen - das kann durchaus festgehalten werden, wenn es auch vielleicht heute nicht von vielen Seiten zugegeben wird: Der Grieche hat ein unmittelbares, inneres erfühltes Wissen seines Organismus. Und der Künstler bildete seine Gestalten nicht durch äußere Naturanschauung, nicht am äußeren Modell aus; sondern durch inneres Wissen erlangte er Kenntnis von dieser oder jener Muskellage und Muskelhaltung und ihrem Zusammenhang mit dem Seelischen, indem er seinen Organismus mit Seelenstimmung durchdrang und dies zu einer Blüte in seinem Seelenleben brachte.

Man kann aus dem, was noch vorhanden ist, durchaus erschauen: Wenn der Grieche seinen Zeus bildete, so versetzte er sich innerlich in die Stimmung des Zeus, seine Seele durchdrang sich mit der Zeus-Empfindung; dann wußte er, was die Zeus-Empfindung oder die Hera-Empfindung an inneren Spannungen auslöst, und von innen heraus prägte er dem Stoff seine Form auf. Er legte seine Seele in den Stoff hinein. Es ist ganz natürlich, daß unsere heutige Zeit nicht mehr viel Empfindung hat für dieses ganz andersartige griechische Fühlen. Weil es aber ganz anders war, so stehen auch die Überreste der griechischen Bildnerkunst für den Blick, der so etwas beachten kann, ganz anders vor uns als alle späteren Werke der Bildnerkunst: so stehen sie vor uns, daß sie zu uns sprechen von demjenigen, was der Mensch als seine seelische Welt erlebt. Sie drücken aus, was seelisch ist, und alles in der griechischen Bildnerkunst drückt aus, was seelisch ist. Man kann ganz davon absehen, ob dies Zeus, dies Hera ist oder andere Götter, darauf kommt es gar nicht an, denn dadurch kommt man von der künstlerischen Betrachtung ab und in das novellistische Element hinein. Sondern darauf kommt es an, daß, wie der Grieche seinen Zeus, seine Hera gebildet hat, wie sie vor uns stehen, sie so in sich abgeschlossen sind, wie unser Seelenleben in uns abgeschlossen ist und wir uns in ihm abgeschlossen fühlen, wenn wir in dem organischen Reflex in der Muskelspannung fühlen, was die Seele im Organismus macht, wenn sie sich in dieser Stimmung erlebt. Dieses mehr oder weniger in der Seele Abgeschlossene, das hinausdringt in den Raum, das sich offenbart in den Raum hinaus, dies ist der griechischen Plastik eigen. Und schauen wir uns ein solches griechisches Kunstwerk an, dann sagen wir uns: Ja, das ist abgeschlossen für sich, das ist eine Welt, die sich so, wie sie dasteht, offenbaren will. Auch die Gruppendarstellungen sind so zu nehmen, bis zum Laokoon hin. Das steht so da, um uns etwas von einer seelischen Welt fühlen zu lassen, und ringsherum ist die übrige Menschheit, die Welt, da stehen wir selbst. Nur indem wir unsere Seele zu dem Kunstwerke hinwenden, hat dieses eine Beziehung zu uns. Aber dieses Kunstwerk gehört nicht demselben Raume, derselben Welt an, in der wir mit unseren Schritten herumgehen, in der wir täglich zueinander sprechen; das fällt heraus aus dieser Welt.

Schauen wir jetzt von den griechischen Kunstwerken herüber - ich will sagen zu dem «Moses» des Michelangelo, der ja ein Teil des nicht zustande gekommenen «PapstJulius-Denkmals» hat werden sollen, dann werden wir uns wahrhaftig sagen müssen: Kein Künstler hat jemals die Bibelstelle, daß dem jüdischen Volke in Moses ein Prophet gegeben worden ist, dem kein anderer jemals gleichen werde, der Gott geschaut hat von Angesicht zu Angesicht, kein Künstler hat diese Bibelstelle von den mächtigen Wirkungen des Willens des Moses so zum Ausdruck gebracht, wie Michelangelo. Alles zeigt uns den Volksführer, der ein Volk mit seinem Geiste durchdringt, der seinen Willen ausströmen läßt über ein ganzes Volk und weit über sein Leben hinaus zum Lehrer dieses Volkes wird. Kraftstrotzend ist dieser Moses, so strotzend von Menschenkraft ist er, daß wir ihm etwas glauben, was unrealistisch ist. Bekanntlich trägt er zwei Hörner am Kopfe. Wenn man sagt: das sind die Symbole der Kraft, so ist damit noch nicht alles gesagt. Lassen Sie einen unbedeutenderen Künstler als Michelangelo eine Figur aufstellen und zwei Hörner an ihr anbringen, so mögen es dieselben Symbole sein; aber wahrscheinlich würden wir sie nicht bewundern, weil wir sie nicht glauben könnten. Michelangelo stellt seinen so von Willen durchdrungenen Moses hin, stellt ihn so hin, daß wir wissen: da ist eine Kraft drinnen, die sich durch etwas Absonderliches ankündigen darf. Wir glauben dem Moses die Hörner, darauf kommt es an. — Nicht darauf kommt es an, was man abbildet, sondern daß man dem, was man abbildet, auch die Einzelheiten, selbst wenn sie unrealistisch sind, glaubt.

Wenden wir von dem Moses den Blick zu dem «Riesen», il Gigante, zu dem David. Wir werden noch von einem anderen Gesichtspunkte aus auf diesen David zu sprechen kommen; sehen wir ihn zunächst einmal im Vergleich mit der griechischen Plastik an. Wie steht er da? So steht er da, daß er den Moment in seiner Seelenverfassung ausdrückt, da er gewahr wird, was ihm von Goliath bevorsteht. Er greift zur Schleuder; es ist der Moment, da er sich unmittelbar zur Ausführung seiner Tat anschickt. Auch früher schon war die Gestalt des jugendlichen David mehrmals dargestellt worden, so von Donatello und von Verrocchio, aber so, daß die Tat schon geschehen war. Bei Donatello wie bei Verrocchio ist David so dargestellt, daß er das Haupt des Goliath unter seinen Füßen hat. Michelangelo wählt sich einen andren Moment: den, wo die Seele des David gewahr wird, was sie zu tun hat. Dieser Moment ist großartig aufgefaßt. Wer könnte glauben, es sei nur festgehalten, wie bei einem griechischen Werk, ein innerer Zustand, eine seelische Verfassung? Aber ebensowenig wie bei Moses, ist bei diesem David nur dieses der Fall; sondern noch etwas anderes kommt zum Ausdruck. Dieser Moses und dieser David, sie stehen so vor uns, daß wir glauben können, der Moses könnte auch aufstehen, könnte weitergehen; er lebt in demselben Raume, in derselben Welt mit uns, in der wir selbst unsere Schritte hineinlenken; er ist in denselben Raum hineingestellt, in dem wir leben. So, aus dem bloß Seelischen herausgenommen, in die Welt die uns umgibt hineingestellt, sind diese Gestalten. Wir würden uns, wenn wir den David gesehen haben, gar nicht wundern, wenn er in dem nächsten Augenblicke tatsächlich zum Wurf ausholen würde.

Das ist der bedeutsame Übergang der alten zur neuen Zeit — und Michelangelo ist von diesem Gesichtspunkte aus sein bedeutsamster Träger — das ist der bedeutsame Übergang, daß die griechischen Künstler Kunstwerke geschaffen haben, die zu uns sprechen, so, daß sie gleichsam die äußere Welt negieren, daß sie für sich dastehen, wie in sich abgeschlossen und auf unsere Seele wie von einer anderen Welt aus wirken. Michelangelo dagegen stellt seine Gestalten in dieselbe Welt hinein, in die wir selber hineingestellt sind; sie leben mit uns da drinnen. Und in einem übertragenen Sinne könnte man sagen: während die griechischen Bildwerke nur Seelenluft, die Luft der Götter atmen, atmen die Gestalten Michelangelos die Luft der Welt, in der wir selber leben. Nicht darauf kommt es an, ob man die Schlagworte Idealismus oder Realismus gebraucht, sondern daß man einsieht, wie Michelangelo der bedeutendste Künstler ist, der die Gestalten herausholt aus der Seele und sie hineinstellt ganz ins Erdendasein, so daß sie wie Lebewesen unter den Menschen dastehen.

Wenn wir dies voraussetzen, daß dem Michelangelo also gleichsam durch den geistigen Fortschritt der Menschheit eine besondere Aufgabe gestellt war, dann wundern wir uns nicht mehr, wenn wir sehen, wie er von frühester Jugend an sich die Fähigkeiten für diese Aufgabe eben aus der geistigen Welt ins Leben mitbringt. Vererbungstheoretiker sollen da einmal zurechtkommen mit ihrer Theorie bei Michelangelo! Er stammte aus einer zwar bürgerlich gewordenen, doch ursprünglichen Adelsfamilie, die später verarmte — wir wissen es aus seinem Lebenslauf, denn er hat sie fortwährend unterstützt. Es war eine Familie, die ganz gewiß nichts von dem in sich hatte, was die spezifische Aufgabe Michelangelos war. Zunächst war er dazu bestimmt, ein Schuljunge zu werden wie andere. Aber er zeichnete immer. Und auf ganz sonderbare Weise zeichnete er, so daß man nicht recht wußte, woher er das nahm; und schließlich konnte der Vater nicht mehr anders, als ihn zu Ghirlandajo in die Lehre zu schicken. Aber der Knabe konnte dort nicht viel aufnehmen, trotzdem Ghirlandajo ein großer Künstler war. Was Michelangelo zeichnete, das entsprang wie selbstverständlich aus seinem Wesen heraus. Aber etwas anderes ergab sich für ihn. Dadurch daß man durch sein Zeichnen auf seine Begabung aufmerksam geworden war, nahm ihn der Mediceerfürst, Lorenzo de’Medici, in sein Haus, und er wuchs dort heran durch drei Jahre hindurch. Geboren ist Michelangelo am 6. März 1475; im Hause des Mediceers Lorenzo lebte er vom Jahre 1489 bis 1492. Was er nun aufsuchte, was für ihn von besonderer Bedeutung war, das waren die allerdings hier nur geringfügigen Reste des Altertums, der antiken Bildhauerkunst. Aber er verband sehr bald - und das ist das Charakteristische — das, was er sah und was einen tiefen Eindruck auf ihn machte, mit einem fleißigen, intensiven Studium der Anatomie. Und nun sehen wir, wie in Michelangelos Seele heranwächst eine genaue Kenntnis des inneren Gefüges des Menschenleibes. Man sieht es allem, was er geschaffen hat, an, wie er seine anatomischen Studien angewendet hat, wie er sich Kenntnis davon verschafft hat: wenn die Seele dieses oder jenes erleben soll, wenn sie diese oder jene Stimmung und Verfassung haben soll, dann ist es nötig zu wissen, wie sich dieser oder jener Muskel stellt.

Nun sehen wir, wie in der Seele Michelangelos zwei Strömungen zusammenfließen. Das, was anders war, als es eine Begabung seiner Zeit jemals hervorbringen konnte, weil die Menschheit jetzt zu einer anderen Epoche vorgeschritten war, was die Eigenheit der griechischen Kunst gebildet hatte, das sah er; aber er hatte nötig, weil seinerzeit die Fähigkeit entschwunden war, die Eigenheiten des Leibes zu erfühlen, wie es die griechische Kunst vermochte er hatte nötig, von außen anzuschauen den Bau des Leibes, hinzuschauen auf den äußeren Bau. Was der Grieche in sich erfahren hatte durch den inneren Lebenssinn, das mußte Michelangelo erfahren durch die äußeren Sinne, durch das Hinschauen auf die Natur. Er mußte aus der Natur herausholen durch die äußeren Sinne, was der griechische Künstler aus sich durch den in ihm noch regen Lebenssinn hatte gewinnen können. — An einem solchen Falle zeigt sich uns, wie die Seelen-Entwickelung der Menschheit vorwätrtsschreitet, wie die Seele in einem Zeitalter nicht das kann, was sie in einem anderen Zeitalter kann, und wie, wenn ein Größtes erreicht werden soll, in den verschiedenen Epochen die Seele dies mit verschiedenen Mitteln erreichen muß.

Wenn wir nun sehen, wie Michelangelo auf Grundlage dessen, was er sich auf die eben geschilderte Weise bereits erworben hatte, als ganz junger Mensch 1498 schon jenes wunderbare Werk vollendet, das uns gleich rechts entgegentritt, wenn wir in die Peterskirche in Rom gehen, seine wunderbare Pietà, wenn wir sehen, was er mit seinen Mitteln schon an diesem frühen Werke erreicht hat, das noch etwas die Spuren trägt der italienischen Künstlertradition, die von Cimabue und Giotto herrührt, und das fast noch etwas von byzantinischem Gepräge an sich trägt, so sehen wir trotzdem, wie hineinfließend in dieses Werk, was aus einem genauen Anschauen der menschlichen Leibesform folgt. Und es gelingt Michelangelo schon da, durch das äußere Anschauen wieder eine Plastik erstehen zu lassen, die sich dem Griechentum wirklich gewachsen zeigen kann. Was war nötig geworden? Das äußere Anschauen war nötig geworden. Gerade an dem Werke der Pietà kann es studiert werden. Sehen wir doch, wie in den fortlaufenden Entwickelungsgang der Menschheit seit dem Griechentum hereingewirkt hat etwas diesem Griechentume ganz Fremdes. Der Grieche hatte jenen Lebenssinn, der sich in sich erfühlt. Das ergab wie von selbst die Möglichkeit, zu offenbaren, wie die menschliche Leibesform aussieht in dieser oder jener Stimmung. Nun war von der griechischen Zeit an ins Abendland hineingeflossen jene Weltanschauung, die ausgegangen ist von dem Judentum und die ihre Höhe gefunden hat im Christentum, jene Weltanschauung, die immer etwas in sich trägt von dem Gebot: Du sollst dir kein Bild machen von dem, was geistig ist!

Ich weiß nicht, wieviele Menschen darüber nachgedacht haben, daß zwischen die griechische Zeit und die Epoche Michelangelos eine solche fällt, in welcher das wirklich praktisch wird, sich vom Göttlichen kein Bild zu machen. Die ersten Christen haben sich Christus nicht bildlich dargestellt. Symbole haben sie dargestellt, das Fischsymbol, das Monogramm Christi, aber kein Bild — gerade so wenig wie sich die Juden ein Bild ihres Gottes gemacht haben; und unter den Zehn Geboten sagt eines ausdrücklich: «Du sollst dir kein Bild machen von Gott, deinem Herrn!» Und siehe da — wir schreiten in die Sixtinische Kapelle hinein, in jene Kapelle, welche die bedeutendste der Christenheit ist, und finden dieses Gebot von Michelangelo überschritten! Jene Höhe der künstlerischen Darstellung, die Michelangelo erreicht hat, als er die Decke der Sixtinischen Kapelle malte und das Bild Gott-Vaters mehrmals sogar hingemalt hat — dieser höchste Aufschwung der christlichen Kunst hat nur erreicht werden können durch die Überschreitung dieses Gebotes. Aber zwischen diese zwei Epochen hinein fiel jene Zeit, in welcher das alles erst vorbereitet werden mußte, fiel die Zeit, die uns so recht anschaulich macht, wie wir wirklich nicht einen äußeren Vergleich gebrauchen, nicht etwas, was eine bloße Analogie darstellt, wenn wir sagen: Die aufeinanderfolgenden Epochen der Menschheitsgeschichte wirken so, daß wirklich zwischen die «Tagzeiten» der Geschichte «Nachtzeiten» fallen, in denen gewisse Fähigkeiten der Menschheit wie in Schlafesruhe übergehen müssen, damit sie später gekräftigt wieder hervortreten können. Was in der griechischen Bildhauerkunst geleistet worden ist, das mußte durch eine Epoche hindurchgehen, in welcher auch für die Kunst das Gebot galt: Du sollst dir kein Bild machen! Auch das Bilden mußte durchgehen durch eine «Schlafenszeit» — und wir haben dann die «Tageszeit», das Aufwachen, aber in anderer Form, wieder in Michelangelo. Aber während in der Natur sich alles in gleicher Weise wiederholt, der Tag dem Tage gleicht, die nächste Pflanze der vorhergehenden gleicht, ist es gerade im Menschheitsfortschritt das Charakteristische, daß die Seelen, indem sie ihre Früchte aus einer Epoche in die nächste hinübertragen, zugleich einen Aufstieg durchmachen, eine Metamorphose, eine Veränderung. Aber es muß durchgegangen werden durch eine Epoche der Ruhe menschlicher Fähigkeiten auf diesem oder einem anderen Gebiete.

So sehen wir denn, wie in der Zwischenzeit, in der gleichsam die Kunst geruht hat, herausgetreten ist das christliche Ideal — nicht in einem konfessionellen Sinne soll das hier in Erwägung gezogen werden, sondern von einem Gesichtspunkt aus, der ganz interkonfessionell ist, den jeder zugeben muß, unabhängig von jeder Konfession — die Seelenstimmung der Innerlichkeit, der Verinnerlichung. Wie unendlich viel innerlicher ist das, was sich ausdrückt in der jugendlichen Mutter, die auf dem Schoß hält den verstorbenen Sohn, in jener Pietä-Gruppe, wie unendlich viel innerlicher ist es schließlich als alles, was griechische Kunstwerke enthalten! Innerlicher ist es, und gebildet werden mußte es in einer Zeit, in welcher nicht mehr mit dem inneren Lebenssinn das Organische nachgeschaffen wurde, sondern wo die Seele sich verinnerlichen mußte, und abgelauscht werden mußten die Geheimnisse der Natur durch die äußeren Sinne.

Wie anders als die griechischen Bildhauer steht Michelangelo da am Ausgangspunkte der neueren Zeit, in der Morgenröte der neueren materialistischen Zeit, wo die Sinne der Menschen hinausgerichtet wurden auf die äußere Natur. Es mußten die Menschenseelen durch eine Zeit hindurchgehen, in welcher die Sinne auf das höchste ausgebildet, auf das höchste angespannt werden. Wir stehen noch darinnen. Aber alles muß in der menschlichen Entwickelung ein Gegengewicht haben. So sehen wir Michelangelo auf der einen Seite als den Künstler, der seine Seele ausgießen muß in die Außenwelt, um der Natur seine Gestalten abzulauschen. Damit er aber nicht nur das Äußerliche allein bilde, das, was die Sinne schauen, bildet er aus der fortströmenden Entwickelung heraus das, was der Menschheit zugeflossen ist an innerer Vertiefung der Seele. Diese innere Vertiefung der Seele mußte Michelangelo mit äußeren Mitteln ausdrücken: in das, was er ablauschte der äußeren Natur, konnte er hineingießen unendliche Innerlichkeit der menschlichen Seele. Und so sehen wir daliegen den Leichnam des Christus Jesus auf dem Schoße der jugendlichen Mutter, und wir glauben dem Steine anzusehen: Ja, dieser Leib ist ein schöner Menschenleib, so, wie die Natur ihn will; das konnte ihr Michelangelo ablauschen. Aber etwas anderes tritt uns noch entgegen, was uns gleichsam zwei Aspekte zeigt: Welcher Friede des Todes ist über diesem Leib ausgegossen! Und während wir das Ganze erblicken, das Antlitz der jugendlichen Mutter, die den erwachsenen, bereits toten Christus auf dem Schoße hält —- und doch jung ist, so daß sie niemals in der äußeren realistischen Wirklichkeit die Mutter dieses Mannes sein könnte, haben wir zugleich aus dem geformten Steine heraus das Gefühl: das, was da tot ist, das ist die Gewähr des ewigen Lebens der Menschenseele! Größte Innerlichkeit, höchste Geheimnisse, die hinter der Natur liegen, realistisch ausgedrückt mit den Mitteln der Natur, die Michelangelo wohl studiert hat!

Und wenn wir Michelangelo dann zurückkehren sehen von Rom nach Florenz, so erleben wir ein merkwürdiges Schauspiel. Ein alter Marmorblock liegt da. Ein Bildhauer hatte aus ihm etwas heraushauen wollen; es war ihm nicht gelungen. Michelangelo fällt die Aufgabe zu, daraus etwas zu machen. Er schafft gerade aus diesem Block, der für etwas anderes bestimmt gewesen war, in dieser Zeit den David. Wenn man das ins Auge faßt, und dann hinzunimmt, was er der äußeren Natur an Geheimnissen durch die äußeren Sinne abgelauscht hat, dann kann man jetzt verfolgen, wie Michelangelo eigentlich arbeitet, und wie er uns mit seiner Arbeit so recht zeigt, daß er doch mit einem Teile seines Gefühls hinüberblickt in Zeiten, die noch etwas herauftragen von einem inneren Wissen des Menschen von gewissen Geheimnissen. Michelangelo steht auf der einen Seite schon durchaus am Ausgangspunkte der neueren Zeit. Aber er ist an diesem Ausgangspunkte des Zeitraumes, der alles der äußeren Sinnesbeobachtung verdanken muß, nur dadurch so groß, daß er nun doch in seiner Seele noch etwas herübergetragen hat aus einem Miterleben älterer Epochen, das ihm möglich macht, innerlich noch etwas mitzufühlen von dem, was Goethe den «Geist der Körper»,.den «Geist der äußeren Natur» nennt.

Hierbei möchte ich auf etwas hinweisen, was zu den Dingen gehört, die heute viel zu wenig beachtet werden. Wenn man sich gerade durch Geisteswissenschaft einen gewissen Blick angeeignet hat auch für die Phantasie, und man geht — nicht einmal durch ein Marmorfeld, sondern nur durch irgend welche Felsmassen, dann hat man den mannigfaltigen Gesteinsbildungen gegenüber die Empfindung: das muß dies oder jenes werden. Man sieht schon dem Stein an, der einem entgegentritt, was er werden muß. Und nicht umsonst findet man so viele Erzählungen von verzauberten Rittern auf Rossen oder sonstwie unter der Bevölkerung solcher Gegenden; denn wenn da oder dort irgend ein Felsblock auf sonderbare Art aus dem Gestein herausragt, dann wird das Volk zum Plastiker und erzählt, daß dort ein Ritter eine Untat begangen hat und dafür zu Stein geworden ist. Die plastische Phantasie wirkt dem Stein gegenüber in der Weise, daß man sich sagt: mit einem geringen mußt du dich umschaffen lassen zu dem, was als menschliche oder tierische Gestalt in der Natur lebt. Man merkt dadurch etwas von dem, was Goethe den «Geist der Natur» nennt. Die Mineralien sind nicht alle gleich; jeder Stoff fordert sein Besonderes. Der Stoff enthält gewisse Geheimnisse, die wir ihm ablauschen müssen. Und auf eine Seele wie diejenige Michelangelos wirkt ein Block, der vor ihm steht, in der Weise, daß er darangeht ihn zu bearbeiten, indem er sich nur für seine Gedanken ein Modell macht. Das Modell hat aber keine andere Bedeutung, als daß es zunächst seine eigene Idee gibt. Das was er schafft, dazu gibt ihm die Intention im Grunde genommen der Stein. Er steht vor dem Stein - ich will etwas radikal schildern - und so wie der Stein ist, so sieht er ihm an: so muß die Hand liegen, so muß das Bein gestellt sein, so und nicht anders muß alles sein. Michelangelo ist außerdem ein Künstler, der nicht ein Stück von dem Stein verloren hat, das heißt unnötig abgehauen hat. Darum beginnt er am Steine ringsherum da, wo er die Hauptfront hat, und da, wo der menschliche Organismus seinen Hauptschwerpunkt hat, zunächst leise, gleichsam wie reliefartig zeichnend die Oberfläche zu bearbeiten, so daß zunächst etwas dasteht wie eine Art Gespenst von dem, was werden soll. Dann beginnt erst die Arbeit mit dem Stehbohrer - den Laufbohrer kannte Michelangelo noch nicht - und dann beginnt er erst herauszuschlagen weitere Vertiefungen. Dann beginnt erst die laufende Arbeit mit Spitzhammer und Meißel, und zuletzt ist der Eindruck da, daß der Block von selbst gegeben hat, nachdem weggeschafft worden war, was nicht dazu gehörte, was er aus sich selber geben konnte. Daher würde ein Künstler wie Michelangelo niemals in derselben Weise irgendein Motiv in Bronze oder in einem anderen Materiale geben, wie er es in Stein gibt. Was man als Ausdruck des Gesichtes im dichterischen, novellistischen Sinne vor sich hat, das gehört ja nicht zur plastischen Kunst. Zur Plastik gehört das, was ich eben zu charakterisieren versuchte: Enträtseln das, was im Steine verzaubert ist; aus dem Steine selbst das herauszuholen, was die Volksseele ahnt, wenn sie da oder dort, in diesem oder jenem Steine einen verzauberten Ritter oder dergleichen sieht. Um das herauszuholen, dazu mußte aber Michelangelo eben eine genaue Kenntnis haben von dem, was ihm die Anatomie geben konnte, weil er mit den äußeren Sinnen sich anpassen mußte dem Material, weil er nicht mehr haben konnte den inneren Lebenssinn, der der griechischen Kunst noch eigen war. Und durch dieses sorgfältige Studium der Anatomie steht er am Ausgangspunkte der neueren Zeit zur Natur und ebenso zur Kunst in demselben Verhältnis, zu welchem auch die Naturwissenschaft geführt hat. Nicht umsonst ist der Todestag Michelangelos der Geburtstag Galileis, eines der Schöpfer der modernen Naturwissenschaft. Wenn Michelangelo künstlerisch zusammenfaßt, was aus einer alten Zeit herüberkommt, aber es als Künstler durchdringt mit dem Anschauen seiner Zeit, so steht er zugleich als Künstler zu der Natur in einem Verhältnis, wie der moderne Naturforscher in seiner Art, nur auf dem Gebiete der Wissenschaft. Das ist der andere Gesichtspunkt, den man sich insbesondere bei seinem David vor Augen führen kann, weil es Michelangelo dabei zu tun hatte mit einem Block, der schon dalag und der für etwas ganz anderes bestimmt war, und dem er das Geheimnis abzulauschen hatte, was er sein sollte; dann ist der wunderbare David daraus hervorgegangen.

So sehen wir denn jenen Mann ganz hineingewachsen in die innerste Natur seiner Zeit, in das, wodurch seine Zeit sich anschließt an die vorhergehende und wiederum den Ausgangspunkt bildet für die nachfolgende. Was ich auseinandergesetzt habe, ist das echt Michelangelosche Wesen. Daß er Madonnen macht, daß er diese oder jene christlichen Motive darstellt, das liegt in der ganzen Kultur; das ist ihm von außen gegeben — mehr vielleicht als irgend einem anderen Künstler. Was er mit seiner Seele in die Zeit hineinbrachte, das ist das, was ich zu charakterisieren versuchte, und es zeigt sich dies noch an manchem anderen, Seine Welt der Kunst ist mit der Welt, in der wir leben, eins. Seine Kunstwerke stehen in demselben Raume drinnen, in dem wir selber stehen. Das ist geradezu das Leitmotiv im Michelangeloschen Schaffen. Was er tut, steht unter dem Eindrucke dieses Leitmotivs. Man sehe sich Michelangelos Madonnen an, die Madonna mit dem Kinde. Das Kind ruht bei Madonnen-Darstellungen zumeist ganz klein auf dem Schoß der Mutter. Michelangelo geht in der Medici-Kapelle, nachdem er diese Phase durchgemacht hat, dazu über, das Kind so groß darzustellen, daß es neben der Mutter steht, daß es ausschreiten kann mit seinen Füßen, weil er es auch hineinstellen will in den Raum, in die Welt, in der wir sind. Er schafft in dem Kinde ein gleiches Wesen mit uns in realem Sinn, daher muß er es herausheben aus der Ruhe, aus der inneren Abgeschlossenheit; er muß es in Bewegung bringen, damit es, mit Ausnahme davon, daß es in Marmor dasteht oder im Bilde festgehalten ist, in genau derselben Welt lebt, in welcher wir leben. Und selbst, wenn wir später sehen, wie er die Sixtinische Kapelle ausmalt, diese wunderbare Decke, wo er die ganze vorchristliche Zeit mit der Weltschöpfung zusammen in einer grandiosen Weise zur Darstellung gebracht hat, wenn wir die alten Propheten und Sibyllen sehen, die an den Seiten angebracht sind, wenn wir das alles auf uns wirken lassen und uns dann fragen: Für was interessieren wir uns denn mehr, für dasjenige, was da ausgedrückt ist, oder für die Art, wie Michelangelo das gemacht hat? — dann hat man zuweilen das Gefühl, daß die Verkürzungen an diesem oder jenem Bein, diese oder jene Stellung des Körpers, die unmittelbar das zum Ausdruck bringt, was ich eben als den Nerv Michelangeloscher Kunst darzustellen versuchte, einen noch mehr interessieren als alles übrige, was an Inhalt, an Novellistik zum Ausdruck kommt, was man in der einen oder anderen Weise enträtseln kann.

Was Wunder dann, daß dieser Künstler sich die Aufgabe setzen wollte und von Papst Julius II. darin zunächst unterstützt wurde, etwas zu schaffen, das in seiner ganzen Konfiguration mit dem unmittelbaren Leben der Zeit zusammenhängt. Nicht so zusammenhängt, wie Zeus, Hera, Apollo, auch selbst noch in der Form, wie es der Apollo von Belvedere zeigt, darinnen stehen in der griechischen Welt; die stehen noch so drinnen in der griechischen Welt, daß sie gleichsam einem anderen Raume angehören, daß sie aus einem anderen Raum heraus sich offenbaren; nein, Michelangelo will ein Werk, wahrhaftig ein gigantisches Werk schaffen, das aber so herauswachsen soll aus der Zeit, daß sich gleichsam das ganze Geschehen der Zeit, das innere Werden der Zeit, der Grundcharakter und die Urnatur dieser seiner Zeit als Strömung in dieses Werk hineinergießen. Vor Michelangelo und vor zahlreichen seiner Zeitgenossen stand Papst Julius II. da wie die mächtige Verkörperung der Zeit, dieser Papst, der sich selbst gern mit Paulus verglich. Wie der mächtige Gebieter der Zeit, so kam er sich selber vor, so stand er vor seiner Zeit. Das was die Zeit bewegte, lebte sich in seiner Seele, in seinen Taten aus. Wenn eine Seele so vor ihrer Zeit steht, hat die Seele Beziehungen zu den Gewalten, die in die Seelen hereinspielen. Das alles, was den innersten Nerv der Zeit repräsentierte, sollte zusammenströmen und wie versteinert erhalten bleiben in diesem Werke, so daß der Kulturstrom, der in Papst Julius II. zum Ausdruck kam, erhalten bleiben sollte im Stein, in dem gigantischen «Papst- Julius-Denkmal», das zu schaffen Michelangelo sich vorgenommen hatte und an dem er nicht nur das Bildnis des Papstes Julius II. anbringen wollte, sondern auch Moses, Paulus und zahlreiche andere Gestalten, die alle die Kraft darstellen konnten, die hereinwirkte in einer so imposanten, kraftvollen Persönlichkeit in die Zeit, die Zeit im Innersten bewegend. Wie die Kräfte selbst wirkten, wie sie durch eine Seele zum Ausdruck kamen, so sollten sie hineinergossen werden in den Stein. Der Stein sollte forttragen, was da lebendig war und was verewigt werden sollte, in die folgenden Zeiten, damit die Geschlechter, die da kommen werden, hinblicken können zu diesem Denkmal und in ihm unmittelbar das große irdische Schriftzeichen haben für das Weiterströmen der Kulturzeit des Michelangelo. Eine wahrhaft gigantische Arbeit! Was Wunder, daß die Seele Michelangelos, die sich so etwas vornehmen durfte, den Zeitgenossen so vorkam, daß sie ihn «terribile» nannten und gefürchtet haben. Er hatte etwas in sich, was unbegreiflich war.

Papst Julius II. hatte mit ihm den Plan zu diesem Grabdenkmal besprochen. 1505 ging Michelangelo wieder nach Rom. Der Papst aber hatte sich von allerlei Leuten von dem Plan abraten lassen, weil man ihm zum Beispiel sagte, daß es Unglück bringe, wenn man bei Lebzeiten an seinem Grabdenkmal arbeiten ließe und dergleichen mehr. Neid und Eifersüchteleien waren dabei im Spiel, und besonders der Baumeister der Peterskirche, Bramante, lag dem Papst in den Ohren. Und so kam es, daß die Arbeit des Denkmals zwar Michelangelo übertragen wurde, daß er aber hingehalten wurde. Ja, er mußte das Bittere erleben, daß er einmal beim Papst gar nicht vorgelassen wurde, als er eines Tages sich Auskunft holen wollte. Deshalb floh er aus Rom und kam nur durch besondere Versprechungen seitens des Papstes wieder zurück.

Ich kann nicht auf alles einzelne eingehen, aber auf das, was bedeutsam ist in bezug auf sein Zeitwirken, möchte ich eingehen. An vielen Gestalten des Denkmals hat Michelangelo gearbeitet. Geblieben sind zum Beispiel Sklavenfiguren, vor allem aber der großartige Moses, der zu diesem Denkmal gehören sollte. Aber dieses Denkmal ist nie so zustande gekommen, wie es zustandekommen sollte, nur der klägliche Rest, der um Moses herum in Rom in einer Kirche aufgestellt ist, so daß man auch wegen der Kleinheit des Raumes die ganze Bedeutung des Moses nicht überschauen kann.

Als nun Michelangelo in Rom war und man sich gleichsam schämte, daß man ihm nicht die Möglichkeit gab, die Arbeit an dem Denkmal fortzusetzen, da suchte man ihm gleichsam eine Abschlagszahlung zu geben. Michelangelo hatte sich früher mehrfach auch in der Malerei versucht und im Grunde Großes geleistet; aber er fühlte sich niemals eigentlich als Maler. Nun suchte man ihn damit zu vertrösten, daß man ihm die Ausmalung der Decke der Sixtinischen Kapelle übertrug. Ohne eigentlich nach seinen eigenen Begriffen dafür genügend vorbereitet zu sein, machte er sich an diese Arbeit. Vier Jahre, von 1508-1512, hat er daran gearbeitet. Man braucht sich nur zu erinnern, was er aus seiner tiefen gepreßten Seele heraus über diese Zeit zu berichten hatte - während er da oben an der Decke arbeitete, beständig den Kopf so weit zurückgewendet, daß er ihn hinterher, selbst monatelang, immer noch in einer schiefen Stellung tragen mußte; er konnte den Kopf nicht wieder gerade halten, und die Augenrichtung hatte sich so ausgebildet, daß er nicht anders als in einer schiefen Stellung lesen konnte. Dabei wurde er mit den Zahlungen hingehalten. Dazu kam noch, daß er jeden Pfennig, den er erübrigen konnte, nach Hause schicken mußte zu seiner bedürftigen Familie. Es ist etwas ungeheuer Bedrückendes, hinzuschauen auf die Art und Weise, wie Michelangelo damals in diesen vier Jahren eines der größten Kunstwerke aller Zeiten schuf — denn das ist die Decke der Sixtinischen Kapelle. Den größten Vorwurf, den man bei der damaligen Entwickelung sich stellen konnte, hat Michelangelo sich gestellt: darzustellen die Vorgänge der Menschheitsentwickelung von der Weltschöpfung an bis zu dem, was zuletzt gipfelt in dem Mysterium von Golgatha, in dem Erscheinen des Christus auf Erden. Und Michelangelo gelang es, das, was sein ganzes Arbeiten durchdrang, sein Prinzip — aber nicht in abstrakten Gedanken ergriffenes Prinzip — jetzt aus der Plastik in die Malerei zu übertragen. Wahrhaftig, wenn man den Blick zunächst hinaufwendet zu der Decke, wie dieses mächtige Gebilde herauswächst, von dem wir glauben, es wächst aus den Wolkenmassen heraus, die erfüllt sind mit Engelsgestalten, und inmitten durch den noch chaotischen Raum sausend das, was man Gott-Vater nennt — wenn man zu dem aufblickt, dann hat man wirklich das Gefühl: Ja, durch den noch chaotischen Raum saust der Gott-Vater, durch sein Wort herauszaubernd aus dem chaotischen Raume die Welt. Aber dieser Raum und diese Figur, selbst alle Einzelheiten, bis zu den wehenden Haaren, bis zu Blick und Gebärde hin, das steht alles in derselben Welt, in demselben Raume drinnen, in den wir hineingestellt sind. Michelangelo stellt uns gleichsam selbst immer in die Welt hinein, in die er seine Schöpfungen hineinstellt. Wir leben mit diesem Gott-Vater, und wir fühlen sein Schöpferwort die Welt durchwellen und durchweben.

Wie die Traditionen alter Weisheit der Menschheit in Michelangelo noch nachklingen, das tritt uns besonders entgegen, wenn wir jenes Bild, das die Erschaffung Adams darstellt, anblicken. Sie geht ja so vor sich, daß der den Weltenraum durchsausende Gott-Vater die Hand ausstreckt, und diese Hand sich fast berührt mit der Hand des noch von Schlaf umfangenen Adam; wir sehen den schlafenden Adam, und den Schlaf gleichsam entweichend durch den Strahl, der durch den Zeigefinger des Gottes in den Zeigefinger des Adam geht, und aufwachend den Adam aus dem Weltenschlaf zum Menschendasein. Und schauen wir zurück zum Gott-Vater, so sehen wir mit ihm zugleich, eingehüllt in sein Gewand und in Wolken — so, daß selbst das Gewand noch getragen ist von den Mächten, die auch den Raum ordnen - Engelsgestalten, aber eine Gestalt herausragend, eine bis zur Jugendlichkeit erwachsene weibliche Gestalt, wach, neugierig hinblickend zu dem eben erwachenden Adam. Wenn wir durch die Geisteswissenschaft prüfen, wie die weibliche und männliche Seelenwesenheit zueinander stehen, wenn wir wissen, wie die weibliche Seelenwesenheit in ihrem Ursprunge in älteren Zeiten gesucht werden muß als die männliche Seelenwesenheit, dann begreifen wir, was Michelangelo darstellen wollte in dieser Tradition, die er malt. Der Bibel gemäß ist Adam zuerst da; aus ihm heraus wird Eva genommen. Dem Adam Michelangelos wird Eva aus Vorzeiten zugebracht; GottVater birgt sie in seinem Gewande. Tiefer als die Tradition der Bibel schaut Michelangelo in die Geheimnisse der Welt hinein. Und so geht es dann weiter: Wir sehen den Sündenfall, die Austreibung aus dem Paradiese, bis zu Noahs Flut.

Und dann die Seitenbilder! Ich kann alles nur ganz skizzenhaft anführen: Auf der einen Seite die Bilder der Propheten, auf der anderen Seite diejenigen der Sibyllen; beides, Propheten und Sibyllen, so erscheinend, als ob sie ankündigen wollten, was der Menschheit kommen soll: das Mysterium von Golgatha, den Christus Jesus. Den Heiden soll er verkündet werden aus den Seelen der Sibyllen heraus, den Juden aus den Seelen der Propheten heraus. Aber nicht rein novellistisch gedacht ist das, was Michelangelo hier charakterisiert, sondern rein künstlerisch hat er diese jüdischen Propheten gestaltet. Wenn wir sie da sitzen sehen, den einen bedächtig über ein Buch gebeugt, den andern nachdenklich, einen vielleicht auch eifernd - alle deuten sie auf eines hin, was erst ganz klar wird, wenn wir den Blick zu den Sibyllen wenden. Diese Sibyllen — eigentümliche Gestalten sind sie. Das gegenwärtige Christentum will nicht mehr viel wissen von diesen heidnischen Vorherverkündigern des Christus Jesus. Was sind das für Gestalten?

Im sechsten Jahrhundert vor der christlichen Zeitrechnung treten die griechischen Philosophen auf. Für die Zeiten vorher können nur Phantasten, wie etwa Deußen, von dem Vorhandensein einer Philosophie reden. In Ionien beginnt sie. Da versucht der menschliche Gedanke zum ersten Mal die Welt durch sich selbst zu erfassen. Da findet jenes Reflektieren des Menschen auf den Gedanken hin statt, das dann in dem großen Plato und in Aristoteles eine so wunderbare Ausgestaltung erfahren hat. Wie ein Schatten dieses, den Gedanken zur höchsten Klarheit bringenden Geistes erscheinen die Sibyllen. Die erste tritt in Ionien auf. Unterbewußte, schauerliche Seelenkräfte, wir würden heute sagen mediale Seelenkräfte strömen in ihnen herauf; in manchmal chaotischer Weise kleiden sie das, was ihnen gegeben wird, in Worte. Manches wird durch sie chaotisch, manches auch weiisheitsvoll der Menschheit verkündigt. Zumeist sind es orakelhafte Aussprüche, die von den Sibyllen den Menschen gesagt werden, die so oder so gedeutet werden können; oft nicht viel Gescheiteres, als bei modernen Medien. Aber dazwischen kommt bei ihnen etwas anderes: Hindeutungen. auf das Christus-Ereignis, die so tief auf der einen Seite bei den Sibyllen genommen werden müssen, wie von einem anderen Gesichtspunkte die Hinweise der jüdischen Propheten. Aber wie waren diese Hindeutungen zustandegekommen? So, daß bei den Sibyllen aus den Untergründen der Seele, aus dem, was nicht im menschlichen Selbstbewußtsein durch Nachdenken in Klarheit gewonnen wird, die Prophezeiungen erflossen — gleichsam medial, orakelhaft, so daß die Sibyllen selbst es nicht kontrollieren konnten, und die, welche diese Prophezeiungen hinnahmen, es auch nicht kontrollieren wollten. So kam es heraus, aber immer zwischen manchem Chaotischen und manchen Torheiten der Hinweis auf jenes bedeutsame Ereignis, das die menschheitliche Entwickelung in zwei Teile spaltet. Wenn man geisteswissenschaftlich prüft, woher die Kräfte dieser Sibyllen kommen, so muß man sagen: sie kommen aus dem, was man die geistigen Kräfte der Erde selbst nennen möchte, die mehr mit den Untergründen der Menschenseele zusammenhängen. Wenn Wind und Wetter an uns heranspielen, so fühlt der, welcher das in Realität empfinden kann, was Goethe den Geist der Natur nennt; er fühlt, wie in allen Elementen Geist durch die Welt wallt. Ergriffen von diesem Geiste niedrigster Art, der aber in sich trug die Kraft, welche hintendierte zu der Erscheinung des Christus, waren die Sibyllen.

Die Propheten bekämpfen diesen Geist. Sie suchten, was sie gewinnen wollten, nur durch das Nachdenken, durch das klare Ich zu gewinnen. Sie wiesen alles Unterbewußte, Sibyllenhafte ab; und wenn sie die höchsten Dinge prophezeien wollten, so mußte es leben in ihrem vollen Bewußtsein. Wie Nordpol und Südpol stehen sich Sibyllen und Propheten gegenüber: die Sibyllen von dem Erdengeist besessen — die Propheten ergriffen von dem kosmischen Geist, der sich nicht durch das unterbewußte Erleben, sondern durch das Vollbewußte der Seele auslebt. So standen sich Propheten und Sibyllen gegenüber, was sich dann dahin zusammendrängt, daß diejenigen, welche das Leben des Christus mitteilten, einen solchen Wert darauf legten, daß er bei denen, durch welche solche sibyllinischen Kräfte gewirkt haben, diese dämonischen Kräfte austrieb. Das ist die Nachwirkung der Kraft der Propheten; auf das wollten sie sich stützen, was über dem Sibyllenhaften liegt. Deshalb legten auch diejenigen, die das Leben des Christus Jesus mitteilten, solchen Wert darauf, daß er die Kräfte der Sibyllen austreibt als dämonische Gewalten.

So steht, den Christus-Impuls vorherverkündigend, auf der einen Seite das Prophetentum, auf der anderen Seite das Sibyllentum vor uns. Das ist das Inhaltliche, das Novellistische der Sache. Was macht Michelangelo daraus? Schauen wir uns die Sibyllen an, zunächst die persische Sibylle. Ein Buch sich unmittelbar vor das Gesicht haltend, ist diese persische Sibylle ganz von den elementarischen Kräften, von den niedersten spirituellen Kräften besessen, um aus den Mitteilungen dieses Buches die Zukunft vorher zu sagen. Dann die erythräische Sibylle: sie steht so vor uns, daß wir ihrem Antlitze ansehen, wie in ihr die Kräfte leben, die mit der geistigen Entwickelung zusammenhängen, die in ihr aber die unterbewußten, nicht die vollbewußten Seelenkräfte ergreifen. Ein Knabe über ihr zündet mit einer Fackel eine Lampe an; in jeder ihrer Bewegungen drückt sich das Elementarische an ihr aus. Die delphische Sibylle: wir sehen sie, wie sie nach einer Schriftrolle greift; in ihrem Antlitz drückt sich aus, elementarische Kraft. Wir sehen sie verwoben mit dem Element der Erde, der Wind fegt über sie hin; wir sehen es an ihren flatternden Haaren, an ihrem flatternden Gewande. Michelangelo malt sie so, daß wir sie unmittelbar mit den elementaren Kräften der Erde verwoben sehen. Wir sehen, wie ihre Seele ergriffen wird von den Kräften der Erde mit medialer Gewalt, und daraus schöpft sie ihre Prophezeiungen, ihre Prophetie. So stellt Michelangelo auch die Sibyllen unmittelbar in das Erdendasein herein, in dem wir selbst leben, das alles mit äußeren Formen ausdrückend. Sehen Sie die cumäische Sibylle, wie sie mit dem halbgeöffneten Munde nur lallt. Dann die libysche Sibylle. Da haben wir die ganze heidnische Vorherverkündigung des Christus-Impulses durch die Sibyllen.

Jetzt wenden wir uns zu den Propheten. Ihre Seelen sind tief ergriffen: wir sehen es an den ernsten Antlitzen, an dem Zerwühlten, das manche haben, an den Bewegungen, an der Art, wie mancher liest, so daß wir glauben, er werde nie mehr abwenden sein Auge von dem, was er liest. Wir sehen sie ergriffen von den prophetischen Wahrheiten, die durch die Ewigkeiten zücken. Man kann sich im künstlerischen Ausdruck nichts Größeres denken, was durch die äußere Form so unmittelbar zum Ausdruck bringt, was gewollt ist, wie diese Gegenüberstellung der Propheten und Sibyllen — beide mit derselben Notwendigkeit dargestellt, so daß wir unmittelbar aus dem Dargestellten herauslesen können, was gemeint ist. Dann brauchen wir keinen Kommentar, keine Bibel und nichts anderes: aus dem, was Michelangelo dort an die Decke gemalt hat, können wir herauslesen, wie es eine Vorherverkündigung des ChristusEreignisses darstellt. - Und man könnte sagen, die ganze vorchristliche Geschichte sehen wir dann in die Wandzwickel hineingemalt, von Bild zu Bild: die Vorfahren der Maria, grandios variiert, trotzdem es eine große Zahl von Bildern ist, überall den Charakter der Epoche ausdrückend in dem einen oder anderen Vorfahren des Christus Jesus.

Wie ist der Christus in die Welt gekommen? Die größte Antwort darauf gibt die Decke der Sixtinischen Kapelle! und wie ist die Welt geworden, damit in ihr das hat geschehen können, was sich als Menschheitsgeschichte bis zum Christentum hin entwickelt hat? Darauf gibt die Antwort, die im Bilde gegeben werden kann, als ein Größtes die Decke der Sixtinischen Kapelle!

Es glaubte Michelangelo, wenigstens nachdem er dieses Werk zu Ende geführt hatte, nun an dem Julius-Denkmal weiterarbeiten zu können. Es wurde viele Jahre wieder nichts. Er wurde hingehalten. Von den mancherlei Werken, die er jetzt in der Zwischenzeit schuf, ist es nicht nötig, daß wir im einzelnen davon sprechen. Aber wichtig ist folgendes. Als man ihm in Rom durch die verschiedenen Verwicklungen gar nicht mehr die Möglichkeit geben konnte, das Julius-Denkmal weiterzuführen, da übertrug man ihm wiederum eine malerische Aufgabe. Er sollte die beiden Schmalwände der Sixtinischen Kapelle ausmalen. Es kam nur zur Ausmalung der Rückwand: das « Jüngste Gericht» sollte dargestellt werden. Wenn wir es heute in Rom an Ort und Stelle anschauen - es ist leichter anzuschauen, dieses Jüngste Gericht, als die Decke, denn bei dieser muß man sich sozusagen am Boden auf den Rücken legen und mit dem Opernglas hinaufschauen -, es ist leichter anzuschauen; aber lange müssen wir es anschauen, um diese komplizierte Komposition zu enträtseln. Allerdings ist das, was Michelangelo dort an die Wand gemalt hat, heute im Grunde genommen nicht mehr vorhanden. Denn es ist nicht nur verräuchert von den vielen Altarkerzen, die beim Meßopfer gebrannt haben in der Kapelle, so daß es längst nicht mehr die ursprüngliche Frische hat, sondern dieses gewaltige Bild wurde noch zu seinen Lebzeiten, weil er zu viele Gestalten ohne Gewänder gemalt hatte, von Künstlern minderen Ranges so malträtiert und übermalt, daß die einzelnen Gestalten «angezogen» wurden; es wurde übermalt in den abscheulichsten Farbenschattierungen und Farbenmischungen. Bis in dieses Bild hinein aber kann man verfolgen, wie Michelangelo als der Künstler, der übergehen mußte zur Epoche der Realistik, wo die Gestalten, die der Künstler schafft, in demselben Raume stehen wie wir, wie Michelangelo zugleich mit dieser seiner Zeitepoche verbunden hat das, was herübergetragen werden mußte aus der griechischen Zeit. Wenn man in dem « Jüngsten Gericht» genau anschaut den Christus als Weltenrichter, so erinnert er zum Teil an Jupiter, zum Teil an Apollo. Herman Grimm, der von nächster Nähe aus den Kopf dieser Figur zeichnen konnte, hat immer wieder betonen müssen, daß er sehr viel Ähnlichkeit hat mit dem Kopf des Apoll von Belvedere. Wir müssen nur daran denken, daß, als Michelangelo im Beginne des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts nach Rom kam, die Laokoon-Gruppe ausgegraben wurde, und der Herkules-Torso, und daß diese bedeutenden Überbleibsel der Antike auf ihn gewirkt haben, daß er dies aber durchdrungen hat mit dem, was sich ihm als sein schöpferisches Prinzip ergeben hatte.

Und nun sehen wir im « Jüngsten Gericht» alles, was die damalige Zeit gefühlt hat in bezug auf das Schicksal der Menschenseelen am Erdenende, das, was man damals das Schicksal der Seligen und der Verdammten nannte, in großartiger Weise wiederum auf dem Bilde Michelangelos aus dem Raum hinauswachsend. Man kann das Bild gleichsam erst blinzelnd ansehen: man sieht dann Wolkengebilde, die so natürlich sind wie die natürlichen Wolkenbildungen. Und wenn man dann genauer hinschaut, dann sieht man, wie naturgemäß herauswachsend aus den Wolkengebilden, die Christus-Gestalt, die Gestalten der posaunenden Engel, die Märtyrer, und alles das, was zum Teil in die Seligkeit geführt, zum Teil in die Hölle gestoßen wird; und man sieht dann, wie das alles herauswächst — wieder wie naturgemäß — aus der Welt, die wir kennen. So läßt Michelangelo gerade in diesem wunderbaren Bilde aus der Welt, die uns bekannt ist, herauswachsen das Geheimnisvollste, was er malen will: das tiefverborgene Schicksal der Menschenseele — läßt es herauswachsen aus dem, was wir kennen, was die Sinne zeigen.

So stand Michelangelo ganz, aber wirklich ganz in seiner Zeit drinnen. Und diejenigen der Zuhörer, die sich erinnern, wie ich im vorigen Winter Leonardo da Vinci und Raffael darzustellen versuchte, sie werden bemerkt haben, daß ich in einem ganz anderen Tone, gleichsam mit einem ganz anderen «Wie» von Leonardo da Vinci und Raffael gesprochen habe, als ich heute versuchte von Michelangelo zu sprechen. Bei Michelangelo sehen wir, wie er ganz persönlich mit dem, was ich als sein Zeitprinzip charakterisiert habe, verwachsen ist. Michelangelo wird ein alter Mann, erreichte ein hohes Alter von nahezu neunzig Jahren; 1564 stirbt er. Er gelangte zu seinen Schöpfungen so, daß wir sagen können: Alle Lebensalter tragen in diese Schöpfungen das hinein, was der Mensch den verschiedenen Lebensaltern entringen kann. Seine Persönlichkeit ist innig verwachsen mit dem, was er der Welt zu geben hat. Wie anders bei Raffael! Raffael stirbt fast in der Mitte der DreiRigerjahre, in demjenigen Menschenalter, wo wir - und insbesondere der Künstler erst das gewinnen kann, was ihm das eigene Gepräge gibt. So steht Raffael so vor uns, daß nichts Persönliches in seine Werke einfließt; alles erscheint bei ihm wie eine Offenbarung überirdischer Mächte. Immer steht man wie vor einer überirdischen Offenbarung bei Raffael, während bei Michelangelo alles ganz persönlich geworden ist. Michelangelo tritt uns so entgegen wie der Gegensatz zu Raffael: Raffael ganz unpersönlich — Michelangelo ganz persönlich. Wer immer alles von irgendeiner Schablone aus beurteilen will, wie moderne Künstler es gerade oftmals tun, der kann nicht eingehen auf die besondere Eigenart des einen oder des anderen; er wird den einen oder anderen vorziehen, während doch beide — und auch der dritte, Leonardo — jeder mit seinem eigenen Maßstabe gemessen werden muß. Wie aber Michelangelo ein besonderes Künstlerisches, welches der Ausdruck des Künstlerischen seiner Zeit ist, seinen Schöpfungen einprägte, gleichgültig, ob plastisch oder malerisch, das zeigt gerade, daß in diesem eigenartigen Sichhineinleben in seine Zeit, wie es uns bei Michelangelo entgegentritt, das Wesentliche zu suchen ist. Daher das Umfassende seiner Werke, so daß er das, was in ihm lebt, auch wirklich universell zum Ausdruck bringen kann.

Es ist noch etwas vorhanden von Michelangelo aus den letzten Jahren - ich habe ja hier nur seine Geistesentwickelung im großen charakterisieren können, nicht alle seine Werke nennen können — da ist zunächst ein kleines Modell, das dann vergrößert worden ist als Holzmodell, von der Kuppel der Peterskirche, jenes Wunderwerkes der künstlerischen Mechanik. Hier, in der Architektur, war für Michelangelo der Raum unmittelbar Problem. Er hat ja nur noch erlebt, daß der gleichsam zylindrische Teil, den man die «Trommel» nennt, sich erhob, nicht mehr die Vollendung der Kuppel. Aber er hat sie noch im Modell dargestellt. Sie sollte zum Ausdruck bringen, was unmittelbar architektonisch das Geheimnis des Raumes ausdrückt. Sie sollte in natürlicher Weise abschließen den Raum, in dem sich eine gläubige Menge aufhalten kann, so daß sie abgeschlossen in dem Raume leben und atmen kann, in dem Kunstwerke leben und atmen, wie sie eben von Michelangelo gemacht worden sind. Sein Raumgefühl, sein Hineintragen des Künstlerischen in dieselbe Welt, in der wir leben, brachte ihn dazu, diese wunderbare architektonische Mechanik des Raumes auszudenken. Die heutige Gestalt der Kuppel der Peterskirche geht ja im wesentlichen auf Michelangelo zurück.

So sehen wir in Michelangelo einen Geist vor uns stehen, der wie mit reifer Seele hereintritt in die Welt des physischen Daseins, der diese reife Seele ganz dazu verwendet, um die Menschheitsentwickelung ein Stückchen vorwärts zu bringen, zunächst auf künstlerischem Gebiete. Was das bedeutet, es kann uns ganz besonders bei Michelangelo vor die Seele treten, bei Michelangelo, der, trotzdem er ein Größtes als Künstler geleistet hat, ein Leben führte, das voll war von Gründen zur Hypochondrie, zum Suchen nach Einsamkeit, zur Unzufriedenheit mit der Welt und dem Dasein. Und wenn man auf sich wirken läßt das, was ich gleichsam nur stammelnd habe andeuten können über die Bedeutung Michelangelos, und es vergleicht mit Worten, die Michelangelo wohl in den letzten Tagen seines Lebens hingeschrieben haben muß über die Art, wie er sich mit seiner Seele im Menschenleben drinnen fühlte, mit dieser seiner Seele, die so Bedeutungsvolles aus geistigen Welten der Welt des Raumes und des Stoffes einzuprägen wußte, da bekommt man so recht ein Gefühl von der Beziehung der Menschenseele zur Umgebung — und namentlich bei einer so großen Seele wie der Michelangelos zu ihrer Zeit. Er stand in seiner Zeit darinnen, aber er stand darinnen in dem Großen seiner Zeit. Als Mensch wurde er sogar schrecklich gefunden. Papst Leo X. traute sich oft nicht, ihn kommen zu lassen; er fürchtete ihn! So wirkte die Größe seiner Seele auf Leute, die wahrhaftig nicht furchtvoll angelegt waren. Aber verstanden in bezug auf sein Inneres wurde er nicht. Will man sich die Seele Michelangelos erklären, so muß man sie sehen im Zusammenhange mit seiner Zeit, mit dem Großen seiner Zeit. Die Seele selbstaber, zurückblickend auf ihr Leben, sprach die folgenden Worte, aus denen wir zugleich sehen können, wie wahr in der Seele Michelangelos doch alles war, was als das Große des christlichen Impulses in seine Schöpfungen eingegangen ist. Mit diesem Großen des christlichen Impulses fühlte er sich so einig, wie man sich nur damals, in seiner Zeit, einig fühlen konnte, in einer Zeit, die noch zusammenhing mit der früheren und die zugleich die Morgenröte einer späteren Zeit war. Man braucht nur das, was uns aus dem « Jüngsten Gericht» trotz aller Verderbnis so grandios anspricht, in München neben das gewiß bedeutsame Werk des großen Peter Cornelius zu stellen, vor das in den dreißiger Jahren des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts entstandene « Jüngste Gericht» in der Ludwigskirche, und man wird das Abstrakte, das Blasse, das uns nicht Ergreifende dieses Bildes nicht zusammenstellen können mit dem, was uns von Michelangelo aus seinem «Jüngsten Gericht» anspricht. Peter Cornelius war ein frommer Mann, ein im Verhältnis zum Christus-Impulse so frommer Mann, wie es ein Mensch im neunzehnten Jahrhundert eben sein konnte. Michelangelo lebte in der Zeit, in der die alten christlichen Impulse in bezug auf ihren Inhalt in ihrer Größe auf seine Seele noch wirken konnten, und er bildete dann aus ihnen heraus gerade das, was in der Form, im künstlerischen Wie schon ganz der Zeit angehört, in der wir selbst drinnen stehen. Das erzeugte in ihm die Stimmung jenes Gedichtes, das uns zeigt, wie wir uns zu ihm stellen müssen und ihn als Mensch auf uns wirken lassen müssen — jene Strophen, die wohl in den letzten Tagen seines Lebens entstanden sein mögen:

Im Hafen lieg ich, den wir all’ erreichen,
Gebrechlich war die Barke, die mich trug,
Sturmvoll die Fahrt, doch jetzt gilt es, im Buch
Des Lebens meine Rechnung auszugleichen.

Einst war die Kunst mein Glück, berauschend tränkte
Ihr Nektar mich, der so verlockend schäumte,
Idol und Göttin war sie, und ich träumte,
Bis ich erwachend seh, was sie mir schenkte!

Zwiefach wälzt sich Vernichtung auf mich zu;
Der Tod, der jetzt mich fortnimmt, ohn’ Erbarmen,
Und nach ihm, jener ew’ge Tod voll Schrecken!

Marmor und Farben geben keine Ruh,
Nur Eins gibt Trost: zu schaun nach jenen Armen,
Die sich vom Kreuze uns entgegenstrecken.

Michelangelo war auch ein großer Dichter. Auch was von seinen Dichtungen auf uns gekommen ist, zeigt denselben Geist, den wir in seinen Bildwerken und in seinen Malereien finden können. Und so fühlte er am Rande seines Lebens! Und doch sehen wir aus diesem Gedichte, was in seiner Seele lebte und leben mußte, damit es solche Form annehmen konnte, wie sie uns so sprechend von dem größten Geheimnis der Welt erzählt, etwa in den Propheten und Sibyllen, in der Weltschöpfung, im Jüngsten Gericht, im David, im Moses und in der Pietà.

Die letzten drei Zeilen des eben vorgelesenen Sonettes zeigen, daß doch etwas war in ihm, was nicht fertig wurde mit dem Weltenprozeß der Menschheit; und das war im Grunde genommen zeitlebens in ihm. Denn er steht, man möchte sagen, wie eine Zeiterscheinung, noch im Alten und schon im Neuen. Das zeigt uns auch ganz besonders jenes Werk, das er dann wiederum unter dem Einflusse eines späteren Papstes in Florenz ausgeführt hat: die Mediceer-Gräber, das man ihm auch wieder übertrug, um ihn zu vertrösten für ein größeres Werk, namentlich auch die Fortsetzung der Arbeit an dem Denkmal Julius II. Für zwei Mediceer, Giuliano und Lorenzo, sollte er Grabdenkmäler errichten. Nicht nur daß diese Kapelle, in der sich die beiden Grabdenkmäler befinden, in den beiden Bildwerken — ursprünglich hätten es vier sein sollen — uns ganz den Michelangelo zeigt, wie wir ihn heute kennen gelernt haben, in der einen Gestalt alles sinnend, in der anderen alles tatkräftiges Wollen und Würde. Aber wiederum so, daß wir das Gefühl haben: jeden Augenblick könnten die beiden Gestalten aufstehen und handeln, indem sie das ausführen, was Michelangelo in sie hineingelegt hat. Aber noch etwas anderes sehen wir in dieser Kapelle: jene vier Gestalten, zu zwei und zwei angeordnet, die man nennt «Tag» und «Nacht», «Morgenröte» und «Abenddämmerung». Ich habe sie mir oft angesehen, immer und immer wieder. Sie gehören zu demjenigen, was ich aus einer inneren geistigen Verpflichtung heraus mir immer am längsten angesehen habe, wenn es mir vergönnt war, in Florenz zu sein. Und ich kann nicht anders, mag das der eine oder andere noch so phantastisch finden, ich kann in diesen Gestalten nicht einfach kraftlose und saftlose Allegorien sehen. Ich versuchte mit allen Mitteln, welche die Geisteswissenschaft an die Hand gibt, darüber nachzudenken: Wenn man bei der Menschenwesenheit davon überzeugt ist, daß in der Nacht dasjenige, was man in der Geisteswissenschaft Ich und astralischen Leib des Menschen nennt, herausgeht aus dem physischen Leib und ätherischen Leib, und der ätherische Leib zurückbleibt und kraftvoll wirkend den physischen Leib durchdringt — wie kann man das darstellen, wie muß man die Gebärde dieses Ätherleibes wählen, damit diese Wahrheit, die gerade durch die Geisteswissenschaft hervortritt, auch äußerlich plastisch dargestellt werde? Wie muß man den schlafenden Menschen darstellen, wenn man ihn so recht im Sinne der geisteswissenschaftlichen Darstellung fühlte? Nun, so muß man ihn darstellen, wie Michelangelo die «Nacht» dargestellt hat! Realität, aber im geistigen Sinne Realität, nicht eine Allegorie oder ein Symbol der Nacht, sondern der wirkliche schlafende Mensch, wie er durch die Geistesforschung verstanden wird, liegt in dieser Frauengestalt vor uns,’ bis in die Gebärde der Hand, der Arme und des Beines. Der Mann, der so sehr die Gestalten seiner Kunstwerke in denselben Raum hineinzustellen wußte, in dem wir selbst stehen, er wußte auch, was es für eine Bedeutung im Raume hat, wenn das Geistig-Seelische des Menschen das Körperlich-Leibliche verlassen hat, dieses letztere aber noch belebt ist. Und wenn ich untersuche, wie sich die einzelnen Glieder des Menschen verhalten, und dann die anderen Gestalten ansehe, so sehe ich, wie sie sich decken mit dem, was ich hier einmal «geistige Chemie» genannt habe, wie ich diese geistige Chemie auseinandergesetzt habe; so stehen sie in dieser Schöpfung Michelangelos vor mir. Geistiger Realismus im höchsten Maße!

Auch dem, der auf dem Boden der Geisteswissenschaft im engeren Sinne steht, der ersehnen möchte, daß der Kultur der Menschheit diese geisteswissenschaftlichen Wahrheiten eingeprägt werden, auch dem steht Michelangelo noch nahe, weil er am Ausgangspunkte desjenigen Zeitalters steht, das, nachdem andere, frühere Zeiten andere Aufgaben gehabt hatten, die Aufgabe hatte, gerade die Verinnerlichung zu suchen, die zunächst nur in der religiösen Verinnerlichung des Christentums lag, und die heute darin liegt, daß man die Menschenseele in ihrem eigenen Ich zusammenhängend findet mit der Seele, die durch das Weltall wallt und wogt. Am Ausgangspunkte dieses Zeitalters steht Michelangelo - da, wo er abgeschlossen von der Außenwelt in der einsamen Mediceerkapelle stand, ganz allein arbeitend, oftmals in der Nacht, seine Gesundheit untergrabend, so daß die Leute Angst hatten vor seinem Aussehen, da er ganz abgemagert war und kaum noch die Beine bewegen konnte. Er war aber doch so stark, daß er nachher wieder nach Rom gehen und seine anderen Arbeiten ausführen konnte. Als er da so arbeitete, da wirkten schon in ihm die Kräfte, nach denen wir geisteswissenschaftlich wieder suchen. Deshalb steht er uns zugleich so nahe. Und vielleicht am nächsten steht er uns, wenn wir uns ganz vertiefen in diese nicht allegorischen, sondern realistischen vier Gestalten, die das Geistige am Menschen ebenso Wesen und Leben von unserem Wesen und Leben sein lassen, wie Michelangelo das früher in Verbindung mit dem äußeren Leibe bei dem Moses und bei David getan hat, und wie es ihm gelungen ist, Farbe und Form seinen Bildern in der Sixtinischen Kapelle einzuprägen.

So dürfen wir wohl sagen, was ich schon oft erwähnt habe: Geisteswissenschaft fühlt sich im Einklange mit dem besten Sehnen und Hoffen derjenigen Geister der Menschheit, die dem geistigen Wesen und Wirken selber nahe standen. Bei Michelangelo tritt es uns grandios entgegen. Wenn wir von diesem Gesichtspunkte ausgehen und ihm persönlich in seiner Seele nahe treten wollen, dann müssen wir uns sagen: Es konnte zunächst diese Menschenseele nur glauben, daß sie nur einmal in das Erdendasein hineingestellt sei und die Früchte dieses Erdendaseins nicht hinübertragen könnte in die Zukunft der Menschheitsentwickelung. Dieser Durchgangspunkt mußte erst durchschritten werden, bevor die Lehre von den wiederholten Erdenleben wirken konnte, zu deren Aufnahme die gegenwärtige Menschheit wirklich reif sein kann, wenn sie will. So schauen wir auf Michelangelo hin, führen uns noch einmal vor Augen, wie er selbst — schon in sich tragend die deutlichen Merkmale der Zeit, in die wir uns auch nun versetzt fühlen — dennoch mit dem Weltprozeß, dem er selbst so viel gegeben hat, nicht fertig werden konnte:

Im Hafen lieg ich, den wir all’ erreichen,
Gebrechlich war die Barke, die mich trug,
Sturmvoll die Fahrt, doch jetzt gilt es, im Buch
Des Lebens meine Rechnung auszugleichen.
Marmor und Farben geben keine Ruh,
Nur Eins gibt Trost: zu schaun nach jenen Armen,
Die sich vom Kreuze uns entgegenstrecken.

Wir haben neben alledem die Gewißheit, welche Geisteswissenschaft geben kann: daß das, was in so bedeutungsvoller Weise dem Menschheitsprozeß gegeben wird, wie es durch Michelangelo gegeben worden ist, unvergänglich ist, daß die Früchte davon weiter und immer weiter leben werden in anderen Leben dieser einzigartigen Seele selber, und daß der Erde nicht verloren gehen kann, was ihr einmal eingeprägt wird.

Mag unsere heutige Zeit diese Lehre von den wiederholten Erdenleben ebensowenig verstehen, wie die Zeit Michelangelos seine Malereien in der Sixtinischen Kapelle wenig verstanden hat, indem sie die ungewandeten Gestalten angezogen hat, mag unsere Zeit diese Wahrheit noch so sehr als lächerlich und phantastisch anschauen: gerade die größten Geister lehren uns lebendig, wie der Sinn des Lebens dadurch erfüllt wird, daß wir auf die wiederholten Erdenleben blicken können und hinübertragen können, was in alten Epochen der Menschheit erlebt ist, in die neuen und immer neueren Epochen. Und wenn Goethe gesagt hat: die Natur habe den Tod erfunden, damit sie viel Leben haben könne, so sagt die Geisteswissenschaft: Nicht nur hat die Welt den Tod erfunden, daß sie viel Leben haben könne, sondern daß sie ein immer reicheres und erhöhteres Leben haben kann! Dies aber ist der einzige Gedanke, den wir würdig finden können, um ihn als einen Weltanschauungsgedanken neben solche Gedanken hinzustellen, wie sie sich uns bei der Betrachtung von Kunstwerken ergeben, wie es diejenigen Michelangelos sind.

Michelangelo and His Time from the Perspective of Spiritual Science

Today's lecture is intended to form a kind of episode in this winter's series of lectures. It is intended to do so in a similar way to last year's series of lectures on Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. My aim with such an episodic lecture from the field of cultural or art studies is to show how spiritual science attempts to penetrate the essence of historical development and the human personalities involved in it. In today's lecture in particular, I would ask you to note that, given the nature of the subject, since spiritual science is in a sense only just emerging today, even a lecture such as this must be considered a preliminary attempt.

In our time, history, like other sciences, is regarded as a real science. Nevertheless, a very noteworthy contemporary book disputes history's right to call itself a science, on the grounds that history is merely a compilation of individual events and facts which, in the form in which they appear to us in history, do not occur a second or third time; so that a witty contemporary, who opposes the scientific character of history, says: If you know anything about a raindrop, you can say something scientific about it according to the laws it follows, because other raindrops follow the same laws. You can do the same with every beetle and with everything that belongs to the world in a repetitive way, so to speak. Historical facts stand alone; one can recount them, but one cannot base anything on them that could be called science in the true sense of the word. — If one takes those concepts and ideas that are today called scientific, on the basis of which science is judged, then one must actually agree with the man. The situation is different when historical observation is taken in the sense that has often been indicated here, and for which, basically, none other than Lessing is the standard-bearer of modern times. I have already pointed out how Lessing, too, regarded history as a development, or perhaps we might say today as an upward ascent of the whole of humanity, in such a way that what carries over from epoch to epoch are the human souls themselves. Meaning and context come into history at the moment when we no longer need to view it merely as a sum of successive events that do not repeat themselves, but when we can view history in such a way that souls live out their lives again and again in successive earthly lives, so that what has affected souls in ancient times is carried over by these souls, passes through the spiritual world between death and a new birth, and is fertilized there, only to then appear in a new earthly life in such a way that real progress and development in the succession of historical events is possible. Thus, through spiritual science, history becomes a science again — not because the laws repeat themselves in it as they do in external nature, but because we may regard history as that which approaches human souls in successive lives from epoch to epoch, so that in fact it is not the laws, but the souls that repeat their lives, that enter life again and again. But then the consideration of the epochs becomes meaningful; then the character of an epoch becomes significant to us as something that souls coming over from earlier epochs can experience that they could not experience before, and which they now carry over into later epochs.

I would like to say: perhaps not theoretically and abstractly, but intuitively through idealistic and artistic contemplation, people can be convinced of such a course of human history when they consider the great epochs of artistic development and the great artists in their development. Such a conviction, like that of the return of the soul, of the complete life of human beings, which proceeds in such a way that we have to distinguish between one part of existence between birth and death and the other part between death and a new birth in the spiritual world; the conviction of these repeated earthly lives cannot be gained through any kind of abstract contemplation. But anyone who engages in contemplation of life, anyone who tries to account for the mysteries of existence from all sides, will find that — as I said, not with tumultuous steps — this conviction can suddenly come to them, but that in the soul this conviction of repeated earthly lives must develop more and more the more one considers reality in its entirety. I would like to present such a chapter for consideration of reality, leaving it up to each individual to draw their own conclusions, by attempting today to consider the way in which Michelangelo fits into Western spiritual life.

If we consider this Western spiritual life, if we consider the entire spiritual life of humanity from the point of view of repeated earthly lives, then we must say to ourselves: it makes good sense in the development of humanity that successive epochs are fundamentally different, that souls always experience different and varied things in these epochs. Only those who take a very short-sighted view of human history can entertain the idea that the human soul, as it is today, has always been so since it more or less rose above animal nature. Anyone who delves deeper into the times of ancient history, who approaches pre-Christian times with the means of spiritual science itself, will find that the whole basic mood and disposition, the constitution of the human soul in older times, was different and has changed significantly in the course of human development up to our times, so that the configuration of the soul has always been different in the successive epochs of human development. This becomes particularly apparent when we take an artist as significant as Michelangelo in his time, the sixteenth century, and compare him with artists who achieved similar things in earlier epochs of human history in a field similar to his. In historical terms, Greek sculpture and Michelangelo's work naturally come to mind. But for those who take a closer look at what this involves, even when considering only what is historically available, there is a huge difference between Greek sculpture and Michelangelo's creations. To do this, we need to briefly consider the special way in which Greek sculpture can actually affect us, something that is little noticed today.

It is quite unfortunate that such a lecture cannot be given with slides or other aids; however, the content of the development of art is already available today in such excellent reproductions of numerous works that it is easy for everyone to gain an insight, also through the images, into what I will take the liberty of explaining today. — When Herman Grimm set out to write his wonderful work on Michelangelo in the 1850s, he could not even think of enriching his work with illustrations, whereas when it was republished forty years later, it was accompanied by illustrations, which made it possible, one can say without exaggeration, reveal unheard-of secrets about Michelangelo that cannot be gleaned from what was previously available only in Herman Grimm's portrayal of “The Life of Michelangelo.” Photography and phototype have advanced so much in recent decades that it is now truly possible, for the salvation of humanity, to gain insight into at least what has been passed down through the ages in the development of art in terms of the configuration of ideas, the configuration of forms, and the like.

When one allows Greek art, sculpture, to work its effect on oneself, one must say: it affects us in such a way that we cannot escape the feeling that the best of Greek plastic art, which may no longer even exist today, must have spoken to people like news from another world. I do not mean the external aspect—for I do not wish to make an unartistic observation—that the Greeks mostly depicted gods, divine deeds, and superhuman actions. I do not mean that, I do not mean the content of art, but rather the artistic nature of art itself, its form. How did this come about? It came about because the Greeks carried something in their souls that they did not derive directly from nature through their external senses. The Greeks carried within themselves an inner, intuitive knowledge of the way in which the human organism is structured. Everything that Greece had to offer in terms of educating the human soul contributed to this; but it was also helped by the fact that the Greeks lived in a different epoch of human history, in which the soul still felt intimately connected with its organism, where human beings felt in a completely different way: now you move your hand, now your hand, your arm, forms an acute angle, now an obtuse angle; now your hand or your leg stretches this or that muscle. This being within oneself in the soul, this interpenetration, this feeling through the organic with the soul—that is Greek feeling, Greek sensibility. Therefore, one must say—and this can certainly be stated, even if it is perhaps not admitted by many today—that the Greek has an immediate, inner, felt knowledge of his organism. And the artist did not form his figures through external observation of nature, not from an external model; rather, through inner knowledge, he gained knowledge of this or that muscle position and muscle posture and their connection with the soul, by permeating his organism with the mood of the soul and bringing this to fruition in his soul life.

From what still exists, one can clearly see that when the Greeks created their Zeus, they put themselves in the mood of Zeus, their souls permeated with the feeling of Zeus; then they knew what the feeling of Zeus or the feeling of Hera triggered in terms of inner tensions, and from within they imprinted their form on the material. They put their soul into the material. It is quite natural that our present age no longer has much feeling for this very different Greek sensibility. But because it was so different, the remains of Greek plastic art appear to the eye that can perceive such things in a completely different way from all later works of plastic art: they stand before us in such a way that they speak to us of what human beings experience as their spiritual world. They express what is spiritual, and everything in Greek art expresses what is spiritual. It does not matter whether this is Zeus, Hera, or other gods; it is irrelevant, because that distracts us from the artistic observation and draws us into the novelistic element. What matters is that, just as the Greeks formed their Zeus and Hera, just as they stand before us, they are self-contained, just as our soul life is self-contained within us and we feel self-contained within it when we feel in the organic reflex in the muscle tension what the soul does in the organism when it experiences itself in this mood. This more or less self-contained soul, which penetrates into space, which reveals itself into space, is characteristic of Greek sculpture. And when we look at such a Greek work of art, we say to ourselves: Yes, it is self-contained, it is a world that wants to reveal itself as it stands. The group representations are also to be taken in this way, right up to Laocoön. It stands there to let us feel something of a spiritual world, and around it is the rest of humanity, the world, and there we ourselves stand. Only by turning our soul toward the work of art does it have a relationship to us. But this work of art does not belong to the same space, the same world in which we walk around, in which we talk to each other every day; it falls outside of this world.

If we now look across from the Greek works of art—I mean to Michelangelo's “Moses,” which was to have been part of the “Pope Julius Monument” that never came to fruition—then we must truly say to ourselves: No artist has ever expressed the biblical passage that the Jewish people were given a prophet in Moses, whom no one else will ever equal, who saw God face to face, no artist has expressed this biblical passage about the powerful effects of Moses' will as Michelangelo has. Everything shows us the leader who permeates a people with his spirit, who lets his will flow over an entire people and becomes the teacher of this people far beyond his life. This Moses is bursting with power, so bursting with human strength that we believe something about him that is unrealistic. As is well known, he has two horns on his head. To say that these are symbols of power is not to say everything. If a less significant artist than Michelangelo were to create a figure and attach two horns to it, they might be the same symbols, but we would probably not admire them because we could not believe in them. Michelangelo presents his Moses, imbued with such willpower, in such a way that we know there is a power within him that can be expressed through something unusual. We believe Moses has horns, and that is what matters. It is not what is depicted that matters, but that we believe the details of what is depicted, even if they are unrealistic.

Let us turn our gaze from Moses to the “giant,” il Gigante, to David. We will come back to this David from another perspective; let us first look at him in comparison with Greek sculpture. How does he stand there? He stands there expressing the moment in his state of mind when he realizes what Goliath has in store for him. He reaches for his sling; it is the moment when he is about to carry out his deed. The figure of the young David had been depicted several times before, for example by Donatello and Verrocchio, but in such a way that the deed had already been done. In Donatello's and Verrocchio's works, David is depicted with Goliath's head under his feet. Michelangelo chooses a different moment: the moment when David's soul realizes what it must do. This moment is magnificently captured. Who could believe that it is merely a depiction of an inner state, a mental state, as in a Greek work? But just as with Moses, this is not the only thing that is expressed in this David; something else is also expressed. This Moses and this David stand before us in such a way that we can believe that Moses could also get up and walk away; he lives in the same space, in the same world as us, in which we ourselves direct our steps; he is placed in the same space in which we live. Thus, taken out of the purely spiritual realm and placed in the world that surrounds us, these figures are. Having seen David, we would not be at all surprised if he were to actually take a swing at us in the next moment.

This is the significant transition from the old to the new era—and Michelangelo is its most significant representative from this point of view—this is the significant transition that Greek artists created works of art that speak to us in such a way that they negate the outside world, as it were, that they stand on their own, as if self-contained, and affect our soul as if from another world. Michelangelo, on the other hand, places his figures in the same world in which we ourselves are placed; they live with us there. And in a figurative sense, one could say that while Greek sculptures breathe only the air of the soul, the air of the gods, Michelangelo's figures breathe the air of the world in which we ourselves live. It is not important whether one uses the buzzwords idealism or realism, but rather that one understands how Michelangelo is the most significant artist who brings figures out of the soul and places them entirely in earthly existence, so that they stand among humans like living beings.

If we assume that Michelangelo was given a special task, so to speak, through the spiritual progress of humanity, then we are no longer surprised when we see how, from his earliest youth, he brought the abilities for this task with him from the spiritual world into life. Heredity theorists should come to terms with their theory in Michelangelo's case! He came from a family that had become bourgeois but was originally noble, and which later became impoverished — we know this from his biography, because he continually supported them. It was a family that certainly had nothing in it that was specific to Michelangelo's task. At first, he was destined to become a schoolboy like any other. But he was always drawing. And he drew in such a strange way that no one really knew where he got it from; and in the end, his father had no choice but to send him to Ghirlandajo as an apprentice. But the boy couldn't learn much there, even though Ghirlandajo was a great artist. What Michelangelo drew sprang naturally from his nature. But something else happened for him. Because his talent had been noticed through his drawing, the Medici prince, Lorenzo de' Medici, took him into his house, and he grew up there for three years. Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475; he lived in the house of Lorenzo de' Medici from 1489 to 1492. What he sought out, what was of particular importance to him, were the remnants of antiquity, of ancient sculpture, which were, however, only minor here. But he very soon combined—and this is characteristic—what he saw and what made a deep impression on him with a diligent, intensive study of anatomy. And now we see how a precise knowledge of the inner structure of the human body grows in Michelangelo's soul. You can see in everything he created how he applied his anatomical studies, how he acquired knowledge of them: if the soul is to experience this or that, if it is to have this or that mood and disposition, then it is necessary to know how this or that muscle is positioned.

Now we see how two currents converge in Michelangelo's soul. He saw what was different from what the talent of his time could ever produce, because humanity had now advanced to a different epoch, what had formed the uniqueness of Greek art; but he needed, because at that time the ability to feel the peculiarities of the body, as Greek art was able to do, had disappeared, he needed to look at the structure of the body from the outside, to look at the external structure. What the Greeks had experienced within themselves through their inner sense of life, Michelangelo had to experience through his outer senses, by looking at nature. He had to extract from nature through his outer senses what the Greek artists had been able to gain from within themselves through their still active sense of life. Such a case shows us how the soul development of humanity progresses, how the soul cannot do in one age what it can do in another, and how, if the greatest is to be achieved, the soul must achieve this by different means in different epochs.

When we see how Michelangelo, on the basis of what he had already acquired in the manner just described, completed that wonderful work in 1498 as a very young man, which greets us on the right when we enter St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, his wonderful Pietà, when we see what he had already achieved with his means in this early work, which still bears traces of the Italian artistic tradition originating with Cimabue and Giotto and which still has something of a Byzantine character about it, we nevertheless see how this work is imbued with what follows from a precise observation of the human form. And Michelangelo already succeeds here in creating a sculpture through external observation that can truly measure up to Greek art. What had become necessary? External observation had become necessary. It can be studied precisely in the work of the Pietà. Let us see how, in the continuous development of humanity since Greek times, something completely foreign to Greek culture has come into play. The Greeks had a sense of life that was felt within themselves. This naturally gave rise to the possibility of revealing what the human form looks like in this or that mood. Now, from the Greek period onwards, a worldview had flowed into the West that originated in Judaism and found its zenith in Christianity, a worldview that always carries within it something of the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image of that which is spiritual!

I do not know how many people have thought about the fact that between the Greek period and the era of Michelangelo there was a period in which it became really practical not to make any image of the divine. The first Christians did not depict Christ in images. They depicted symbols, the fish symbol, the monogram of Christ, but no image — just as the Jews did not make an image of their God; and one of the Ten Commandments expressly states: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image of God, thy Lord!” And lo and behold — we walk into the Sistine Chapel, the most important chapel in Christendom, and find this commandment transgressed by Michelangelo! The height of artistic representation that Michelangelo achieved when he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and even painted the image of God the Father several times — this highest upswing in Christian art could only be achieved by transgressing this commandment. But between these two epochs came the time when all this had to be prepared, the time that makes it so clear to us that we really do not need an external comparison, not something that is merely an analogy, when we say: The successive epochs of human history have such an effect that there are indeed “night times” between the “day times” of history, during which certain abilities of humanity must go into a kind of sleep so that they can later emerge strengthened. What was achieved in Greek sculpture had to pass through an epoch in which the commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” also applied to art. Even art had to pass through a “time of sleep” — and then we have the “daytime,” the awakening, but in a different form, again in Michelangelo. But while in nature everything repeats itself in the same way, each day is like the day before, each plant is like the one before it, it is characteristic of human progress that souls, in carrying their fruits from one epoch to the next, undergo an ascent, a metamorphosis, a transformation. But it must pass through an epoch of rest for human abilities in this or another field.

So we see how, in the meantime, when art has, as it were, been at rest, the Christian ideal has emerged — not in a denominational sense, but from a point of view that is entirely interdenominational, which everyone must admit, regardless of their denomination — the soul mood of inwardness, of internalization. How infinitely more inner is what is expressed in the young mother holding her deceased son on her lap in that Pietà group, how infinitely more inner is it than anything contained in Greek works of art! It is more inward, and it had to be created at a time when the organic was no longer recreated with the inner meaning of life, but when the soul had to become internalized and the secrets of nature had to be listened to through the outer senses.

How different from the Greek sculptors is Michelangelo standing there at the beginning of the modern era, at the dawn of the new materialistic age, when people's senses were directed toward external nature. Human souls had to go through a period in which the senses were developed to the highest degree, stretched to the utmost. We are still in that period. But everything in human development must have a counterbalance. So we see Michelangelo on the one hand as the artist who must pour his soul into the outside world in order to listen to nature's forms. But so that he would not only form the external, that which the senses see, he formed from the ongoing development that which had flowed to humanity in the inner deepening of the soul. Michelangelo had to express this inner deepening of the soul with external means: into that which he listened to from external nature, he was able to pour the infinite inwardness of the human soul. And so we see the body of Christ Jesus lying on the lap of his young mother, and we believe we can see in the stone: Yes, this body is a beautiful human body, just as nature intended; Michelangelo was able to listen to this. But something else confronts us, showing us two aspects, as it were: What peace of death is poured out over this body! And as we behold the whole scene, the face of the young mother holding the adult, already dead Christ on her lap—and yet so young that she could never be the mother of this man in external, realistic reality—we simultaneously have the feeling, formed from the stone, that what is dead here is the guarantee of eternal life for the human soul! The greatest inwardness, the highest mysteries that lie behind nature, realistically expressed with the means of nature, which Michelangelo had studied well!

And when we see Michelangelo returning from Rome to Florence, we witness a remarkable spectacle. An old block of marble lies there. A sculptor had wanted to carve something out of it; he had not succeeded. Michelangelo is given the task of making something out of it. From this very block, which had been intended for something else, he creates David at this time. If we consider this and then add what he has gleaned from the mysteries of external nature through the external senses, we can now follow how Michelangelo actually works and how he shows us with his work that he is looking back with part of his feeling to times that still carry something of a human being's inner knowledge of certain mysteries. On the one hand, Michelangelo is already standing at the starting point of the modern era. But he is so great at this starting point of the period, which owes everything to external sensory observation, only because he has carried something over in his soul from his experience of older epochs, which enables him to still feel something of what Goethe calls the “spirit of the body,” the “spirit of external nature.”

Here I would like to point out something that is one of the things that receives far too little attention today. If one has acquired a certain perspective through spiritual science, including for the imagination, and one walks—not even through a field of marble, but just through any rock formations—then one has the feeling, looking at the diverse rock formations, that they must become this or that. You can already see from the stone that confronts you what it must become. And it is not for nothing that there are so many stories of enchanted knights on horseback or otherwise among the population of such areas; for when here and there a boulder protrudes from the rock in a strange way, the people become sculptors and tell that a knight committed a misdeed there and was turned to stone for it. The sculptural imagination works on the stone in such a way that one says to oneself: with a little effort, you can be transformed into what lives in nature as a human or animal form. In this way, one perceives something of what Goethe calls the “spirit of nature.” Minerals are not all the same; each material demands its own particular treatment. The material contains certain secrets that we must listen to. And a block standing before him affects a soul like Michelangelo's in such a way that he sets about working on it, using only his thoughts as a model. But the model has no other meaning than that it initially gives rise to his own idea. What he creates is basically given to him by the intention of the stone. He stands in front of the stone—I want to describe something radical—and he looks at it as it is: this is how the hand must lie, this is how the leg must be positioned, this is how everything must be and no other way. Michelangelo is also an artist who has not lost a piece of the stone, that is, he has not cut away anything unnecessarily. That is why he begins around the stone, where it has its main front, and where the human organism has its main center of gravity, first working on the surface quietly, as if drawing in relief, so that at first there is something like a ghost of what is to become. Only then does he begin working with the hand drill—Michelangelo did not yet know the drill press—and only then does he begin to carve out further recesses. Only then does the ongoing work with the pointed hammer and chisel begin, and finally the impression is there that the block has given itself, after what did not belong to it, what it could give of itself, had been removed. That is why an artist like Michelangelo would never render any motif in bronze or any other material in the same way as he does in stone. What we see as the expression of the face in the poetic, novelistic sense does not belong to the plastic arts. Sculpture involves what I have just tried to characterize: unraveling what is enchanted in the stone; extracting from the stone itself what the soul of the people senses when it sees an enchanted knight or the like here or there, in this or that stone. In order to extract this, however, Michelangelo had to have a precise knowledge of what anatomy could give him, because he had to adapt to the material with his external senses, since he could no longer have the inner sense of life that was still characteristic of Greek art. And through this careful study of anatomy, he stands at the starting point of the modern era in relation to nature and also to art in the same way that natural science has led. It is no coincidence that the anniversary of Michelangelo's death is the birthday of Galileo, one of the creators of modern natural science. When Michelangelo artistically summarizes what has come down from ancient times, but as an artist imbues it with the perspective of his own time, he stands in the same relationship to nature as the modern natural scientist in his own way, only in the field of science. This is the other point of view that can be seen particularly in his David, because Michelangelo was dealing with a block that was already lying there and was intended for something completely different, and he had to listen to the secret of what it should be; then the wonderful David emerged from it.

So we see this man completely immersed in the innermost nature of his time, in that which connects his time to the previous one and in turn forms the starting point for the next. What I have discussed is the true essence of Michelangelo. That he creates Madonnas, that he depicts this or that Christian motif, is part of the whole culture; it is given to him from outside — perhaps more so than to any other artist. What he brought into the era with his soul is what I have tried to characterize, and this is evident in many other ways. His world of art is one with the world in which we live. His works of art stand in the same space in which we ourselves stand. This is precisely the leitmotif in Michelangelo's work. Everything he does is influenced by this leitmotif. Consider Michelangelo's Madonnas, the Madonna with the Child. In most depictions of the Madonna, the child rests very small on its mother's lap. In the Medici Chapel, after going through this phase, Michelangelo moves on to depicting the child so large that it stands next to its mother, that it can step out with its feet, because he also wants to place it in the space, in the world in which we are. He creates in the child a being equal to us in a real sense, so he must lift it out of its tranquility, out of its inner seclusion; he must set it in motion so that, except for the fact that it stands in marble or is captured in a picture, it lives in exactly the same world in which we live. And even when we later see how he painted the Sistine Chapel, that wonderful ceiling, where he depicted the entire pre-Christian era together with the creation of the world in a grandiose manner, when we see the ancient prophets and sibyls placed on the sides, when we let all this sink in and then ask ourselves: What are we more interested in, what is expressed there, or the way Michelangelo did it? — then one sometimes has the feeling that the foreshortening of this or that leg, this or that position of the body, which directly expresses what I have just tried to describe as the essence of Michelangelo's art, interests one even more than everything else that is expressed in terms of content and narrative, which can be unraveled in one way or another.

No wonder, then, that this artist wanted to set himself the task, and was initially supported in this by Pope Julius II, of creating something that was connected in its entire configuration with the immediate life of the time. Not connected in the same way that Zeus, Hera, and Apollo, even in the form shown by the Apollo of Belvedere, are connected to the Greek world; they are still so connected to the Greek world that they belong, as it were, to another space, that they reveal themselves from another space; no, Michelangelo wants to create a work, truly a gigantic work, but one that should grow out of the time in such a way that, as it were, the whole event of the time, the inner becoming of the time, the fundamental character and the original nature of his time pour into this work as a current. Before Michelangelo and many of his contemporaries stood Pope Julius II, like the powerful embodiment of time, this pope who liked to compare himself to Paul. He saw himself as the powerful ruler of time, and so he stood before his time. What moved the times lived out in his soul and in his deeds. When a soul stands before its time in this way, it has connections to the forces that play into souls. Everything that represented the innermost nerve of the age was to flow together and remain preserved as if petrified in this work, so that the cultural current expressed in Pope Julius II would be preserved in stone, in the gigantic “Pope Julius Monument” that Michelangelo had set out to create and on which he wanted to place not only the image of Pope Julius II, but also Moses, Paul, and numerous other figures, all of whom could represent the power that was at work in such an imposing, powerful personality in that era, moving the era to its core. Just as the forces themselves were at work, just as they were expressed through a soul, so they were to be poured into the stone. The stone was to carry what was alive and what was to be immortalized into the following ages, so that future generations could look at this monument and immediately see in it the great earthly symbol of the continuing cultural era of Michelangelo. A truly gigantic work! No wonder that Michelangelo's soul, which was capable of undertaking such a task, struck his contemporaries as so formidable that they called him “terribile” and feared him. He had something within him that was incomprehensible.

Pope Julius II had discussed the plan for this tomb with him. In 1505, Michelangelo returned to Rome. However, the Pope had been dissuaded from the plan by all sorts of people, who told him, for example, that it would bring bad luck to have work done on his tomb during his lifetime, and so on. Envy and jealousy were at play, and Bramante, the architect of St. Peter's Basilica, in particular, was constantly whispering in the Pope's ear. And so it came to pass that although Michelangelo was commissioned to work on the monument, he was kept waiting. Indeed, he had to endure the bitter experience of not even being admitted to the Pope when he wanted to obtain information one day. Therefore, he fled Rome and only returned because of special promises made by the Pope.

I cannot go into every detail, but I would like to mention what is significant in terms of his influence at that time. Michelangelo worked on many figures for the monument. What remains, for example, are slave figures, but above all the magnificent Moses, which was to be part of this monument. But this monument never came into being as it was intended to, only the pitiful remnants, which are displayed around Moses in a church in Rome, so that, also because of the smallness of the room, one cannot grasp the full significance of Moses.

When Michelangelo was in Rome and people were ashamed, as it were, that they had not given him the opportunity to continue working on the monument, they sought to give him a kind of down payment. Michelangelo had previously tried his hand at painting on several occasions and had achieved great things, but he never really felt like a painter. Now they tried to console him by entrusting him with the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Without really being sufficiently prepared for it in his own terms, he set to work. He worked on it for four years, from 1508 to 1512. One need only remember what he had to say about this period from the depths of his troubled soul – while he was working up there on the ceiling, constantly turning his head so far back that afterwards, even months later, he still had to carry it in a crooked position; he could not hold his head straight again, and his eyes had become so accustomed to the position that he could only read in a crooked position. At the same time, he was put off with payments. In addition, he had to send every penny he could spare home to his needy family. It is incredibly depressing to look at the way Michelangelo created one of the greatest works of art of all time during those four years—for that is what the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is. Michelangelo set himself the greatest challenge that could be imagined at that time: to depict the events of human development from the creation of the world to what ultimately culminates in the mystery of Golgotha, in the appearance of Christ on earth. And Michelangelo succeeded in transferring what permeated all his work, his principle — but not a principle grasped in abstract thoughts — from sculpture to painting. Truly, when one first looks up at the ceiling, how this mighty structure grows out of what we believe to be the masses of clouds filled with angelic figures, and in the midst of it, rushing through the still chaotic space, what we call God the Father — when one looks up at this, one really has the feeling: Yes, God the Father rushes through the still chaotic space, conjuring the world out of the chaotic space through his word. But this space and this figure, even all the details, down to the flowing hair, down to the gaze and gesture, all of that is in the same world, in the same space in which we are placed. Michelangelo, as it were, always places us in the world in which he places his creations. We live with this God the Father, and we feel his creative word rippling and weaving through the world.

The way in which the traditions of ancient wisdom still resonate in Michelangelo is particularly evident when we look at the painting depicting the creation of Adam. It shows God the Father, soaring through space, reaching out his hand, which almost touches the hand of Adam, who is still enveloped in sleep; we see the sleeping Adam, and sleep escaping, as it were, through the ray that passes from God's index finger to Adam's index finger, and Adam awakening from the sleep of the world to human existence. And when we look back at God the Father, we see with him, enveloped in his robe and in clouds — so that even the robe is carried by the powers that also order space — angelic figures, but one figure stands out, a female figure grown to youthfulness, awake, looking curiously at the newly awakening Adam. When we examine through spiritual science how the female and male soul beings relate to each other, when we know how the female soul being must be sought in its origin in older times than the male soul being, then we understand what Michelangelo wanted to depict in this tradition that he paints. According to the Bible, Adam came first; Eve was taken from him. Michelangelo's Adam is brought Eve from ancient times; God the Father conceals her in his robe. Michelangelo looks deeper into the mysteries of the world than the tradition of the Bible. And so it continues: we see the Fall, the expulsion from Paradise, up to Noah's Flood.

And then the side images! I can only give a very sketchy description: on one side the images of the prophets, on the other those of the Sibyls; both prophets and Sibyls appear as if they want to announce what is to come to humanity: the mystery of Golgotha, Christ Jesus. He is to be proclaimed to the Gentiles from the souls of the Sibyls, to the Jews from the souls of the prophets. But what Michelangelo characterizes here is not purely fictional; he has created these Jewish prophets purely artistically. When we see them sitting there, one bent over a book in deep thought, the other pensive, one perhaps even zealous – they all point to something that only becomes clear when we turn our gaze to the Sibyls. These Sibyls – they are peculiar figures. Contemporary Christianity no longer wants to know much about these pagan precursors of Christ Jesus. What kind of figures are they?

Greek philosophers appeared in the sixth century BC. Only fantasists, such as Deußen, can speak of the existence of philosophy in earlier times. It began in Ionia. There, for the first time, human thought attempted to comprehend the world through itself. There, human reflection on thought took place, which then underwent such wonderful development in the great Plato and Aristotle. The Sibyls appear like a shadow of this spirit that brings thought to its highest clarity. The first appears in Ionia. Subconscious, eerie soul powers, which we would today call mediumistic soul powers, flow up within them; in sometimes chaotic ways, they clothe what is given to them in words. Some things are proclaimed to humanity in a chaotic manner, others in a wise manner. Mostly, the Sibyls utter oracular sayings to people that can be interpreted in one way or another; often not much more intelligently than modern mediums. But in between, something else comes through: hints of the Christ event, which must be taken as seriously by the Sibyls as the hints of the Jewish prophets must be taken from another point of view. But how did these hints come about? In such a way that the Sibyls' prophecies flowed from the depths of the soul, from that which cannot be gained in human self-consciousness through clear thinking — as if through mediumship, oracle-like, so that the Sibyls themselves could not control it, and those who accepted these prophecies did not want to control it either. Thus, amid much chaos and folly, hints emerged of that significant event that divides human development into two parts. If one examines from a spiritual scientific perspective where the powers of these Sibyls come from, one must say: they come from what one might call the spiritual powers of the earth itself, which are more closely connected with the depths of the human soul. When wind and weather play upon us, those who can feel this in reality sense what Goethe calls the spirit of nature; they feel how spirit surges through the world in all the elements. The Sibyls were moved by this spirit of the lowest kind, but one that carried within it the power that led to the appearance of Christ.

The prophets fought against this spirit. They sought to attain what they wanted to attain solely through reflection, through the clear ego. They rejected everything subconscious, everything Sibylline; and if they wanted to prophesy the highest things, these had to live in their full consciousness. The Sibyls and the prophets stand opposite each other like the North Pole and the South Pole: the Sibyls possessed by the earth spirit — the prophets seized by the cosmic spirit, which lives out not through subconscious experience but through the full consciousness of the soul. Thus prophets and sibyls stood opposite each other, which then converged to the point that those who communicated the life of Christ attached such importance to it that he drove out these demonic forces in those through whom such sibylline powers had worked. This is the aftereffect of the power of the prophets; they wanted to rely on what lies above the sibylline. That is why those who shared the life of Christ Jesus placed such value on him driving out the powers of the Sibyls as demonic forces.

Thus, heralding the Christ impulse, we have on the one hand the prophets and on the other the Sibyls. That is the content, the novelistic aspect of the matter. What does Michelangelo make of it? Let us look at the Sibyls, first the Persian Sibyl. Holding a book directly in front of her face, this Persian Sibyl is completely possessed by the elemental forces, by the lowest spiritual forces, in order to predict the future from the messages in this book. Then there is the Erythraean Sibyl: she stands before us in such a way that we can see in her face how the forces associated with spiritual development live within her, but how the subconscious, not the fully conscious, soul forces take hold of her. A boy above her lights a lamp with a torch; every movement she makes expresses the elemental nature of her being. The Delphic Sibyl: we see her reaching for a scroll; her face expresses elemental power. We see her interwoven with the element of earth, the wind sweeping over her; we see it in her fluttering hair, in her fluttering robe. Michelangelo paints her in such a way that we see her directly interwoven with the elemental forces of the earth. We see how her soul is seized by the forces of the earth with mediumistic power, and from this she draws her prophecies, her prophecy. In this way, Michelangelo also places the Sibyls directly into the earthly existence in which we ourselves live, expressing everything with external forms. See the Cumaean Sibyl, how she only babbles with her mouth half open. Then the Libyan Sibyl. Here we have the entire pagan foretelling of the Christ impulse through the Sibyls.

Now we turn to the prophets. Their souls are deeply moved: we see it in their serious faces, in the disheveled appearance of some, in their movements, in the way some read, so that we believe they will never again turn their eyes away from what they are reading. We see them moved by the prophetic truths that flash through the ages. One cannot imagine anything greater in artistic expression that so directly expresses what is intended through its external form than this juxtaposition of the prophets and sibyls — both depicted with the same necessity, so that we can immediately read what is meant from what is depicted. Then we need no commentary, no Bible, and nothing else: from what Michelangelo painted on the ceiling there, we can read how it represents a foreshadowing of the Christ event. And one could say that we then see the entire pre-Christian history painted in the spandrels, from picture to picture: the ancestors of Mary, magnificently varied, even though there are a large number of pictures, everywhere expressing the character of the epoch in one or another ancestor of Christ Jesus.

How did Christ come into the world? The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel provides the greatest answer to this question! And how did the world become what it is, so that what developed as human history up to Christianity could happen in it? The answer to this question can be given in images, the greatest of which is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!

Michelangelo believed, at least after he had completed this work, that he would now be able to continue working on the Julius monument. For many years, nothing happened. He was put off. It is not necessary for us to discuss in detail the various works he created in the meantime. But the following is important. When, due to various complications, it was no longer possible for him to continue working on the Julius monument in Rome, he was again given a painting assignment. He was to paint the two narrow walls of the Sistine Chapel. Only the back wall was painted: the “Last Judgment” was to be depicted. When we look at it today in Rome, in situ—it is easier to look at this Last Judgment than the ceiling, because with the ceiling you have to lie on your back on the floor, so to speak, and look up with opera glasses—it is easier to look at; but we have to look at it for a long time to unravel this complicated composition. However, what Michelangelo painted on the wall there is basically no longer there today. Not only has it been smoked by the many altar candles that burned during Mass in the chapel, so that it no longer has its original freshness, but this enormous painting was also mistreated and painted over by lesser artists during Michelangelo's lifetime because he had painted too many figures without robes, so that the individual figures were “dressed”; it was painted over in the most hideous shades and mixtures of colors. But even in this painting, one can see how Michelangelo, as the artist who had to transition to the era of realism, where the figures created by the artist stand in the same space as we do, connected what had to be carried over from the Greek era with his own era. If you look closely at Christ as the judge of the world in “The Last Judgment,” he is partly reminiscent of Jupiter and partly of Apollo. Herman Grimm, who was able to draw the head of this figure from close up, had to emphasize again and again that it bears a great resemblance to the head of the Apollo Belvedere. We need only remember that when Michelangelo came to Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Laocoön group was excavated, as was the torso of Hercules, and that these important remnants of antiquity had an effect on him, but that he imbued them with what had become his creative principle.

And now, in the “Last Judgment,” we see everything that people at that time felt about the fate of human souls at the end of their earthly lives, what was then called the fate of the blessed and the damned, growing out of the space in Michelangelo's painting in a magnificent way. One can only look at the painting with squinted eyes, so to speak: one then sees cloud formations that are as natural as natural cloud formations. And when you look more closely, you see how naturally the figure of Christ, the figures of the trumpeting angels, the martyrs, and everything that is partly led to bliss and partly cast into hell emerge from the cloud formations; and you then see how all this emerges — again as if naturally — from the world we know. Thus, in this wonderful image, Michelangelo allows the most mysterious thing he wants to paint to emerge from the world we know: the deeply hidden destiny of the human soul — he allows it to emerge from what we know, from what the senses show us.

Thus Michelangelo was completely, but really completely, immersed in his time. And those of you who remember how I tried to portray Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael last winter will have noticed that I spoke in a completely different tone, with a completely different “how” about Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael than I tried to speak about Michelangelo today. In Michelangelo, we see how he is completely intertwined with what I have characterized as his principle of time. Michelangelo became an old man, reaching the ripe old age of nearly ninety; he died in 1564. He achieved his creations in such a way that we can say: all stages of life contribute to these creations what man can wrest from the different stages of life. His personality is intimately intertwined with what he has to give to the world. How different it is with Raphael! Raphael died almost in the middle of his thirties, at the age when we – and especially artists – can only begin to gain what gives us our own distinctive character. Raphael stands before us in such a way that nothing personal flows into his works; everything about him appears to be a revelation of supernatural powers. With Raphael, one always stands as if before a supernatural revelation, while with Michelangelo everything has become entirely personal. Michelangelo appears to us as the opposite of Raphael: Raphael entirely impersonal — Michelangelo entirely personal. Anyone who wants to judge everything by some kind of template, as modern artists often do, cannot respond to the particular characteristics of one or the other; they will prefer one or the other, even though both — and also the third, Leonardo — must be measured by their own standards. But the way Michelangelo imprinted a special artistic quality, which is the expression of the artistic nature of his time, on his creations, whether sculptural or painterly, shows precisely that the essence is to be found in this peculiar immersion in his time, as we encounter it in Michelangelo. Hence the comprehensiveness of his works, so that he can truly express what lives within him in a universal way.

There is still something left of Michelangelo from his later years—I have only been able to characterize his intellectual development in broad terms here, not name all his works—first of all, there is a small model, which was then enlarged as a wooden model, of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, that marvel of artistic mechanics. Here, in architecture, space was an immediate problem for Michelangelo. He only lived to see the cylindrical part, known as the “drum,” rise up, not the completion of the dome. But he still depicted it in the model. It was intended to express what immediately expresses the mystery of space in architectural terms. It was to enclose the space in a natural way, in which a faithful crowd could gather, so that they could live and breathe enclosed in the space, in which works of art live and breathe, just as they had been created by Michelangelo. His sense of space, his bringing of the artistic into the same world in which we live, led him to conceive this wonderful architectural mechanics of space. The current design of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica is essentially based on Michelangelo's design.

Thus, we see in Michelangelo a spirit standing before us who enters the world of physical existence with a mature soul, who uses this mature soul entirely to advance the development of humanity a little further, initially in the artistic realm. What this means can be particularly evident in Michelangelo, who, despite his greatness as an artist, led a life full of reasons for hypochondria, for seeking solitude, for dissatisfaction with the world and existence. And when one allows oneself to be affected by what I have only been able to stammer about the significance of Michelangelo, and compares it with words that Michelangelo must have written down in the last days of his life about the way he felt with his soul in human life, with this soul of his, which knew how to impress upon the world of space and matter such meaningful things from spiritual worlds, then one really gets a sense of the relationship between the human soul and its surroundings—and especially in the case of a soul as great as Michelangelo's in his time. He stood within his time, but he stood within the greatness of his time. As a human being, he was even found to be terrifying. Pope Leo X often did not dare to let him come; he feared him! Such was the effect of the greatness of his soul on people who were truly not of a fearful disposition. But he was not understood in relation to his inner being. If one wants to explain Michelangelo's soul, one must see it in connection with his time, with the greatness of his time. The soul itself, however, looking back on its life, spoke the following words, from which we can see how true everything was in Michelangelo's soul that entered into his creations as the greatness of the Christian impulse. He felt as united with this greatness of the Christian impulse as one could feel united at that time, in his time, a time that was still connected with the past and at the same time was the dawn of a later era. One need only place what appeals to us so magnificently in “The Last Judgment,” despite all its corruption, next to the certainly significant work of the great Peter Cornelius in Munich, the “Last Judgment” in the Ludwigskirche, and one will not be able to reconcile the abstract, the pale, the unmoving nature of this painting with what appeals to us in Michelangelo's “Last Judgment.” Peter Cornelius was a pious man, as pious in relation to the Christ impulse as a person in the nineteenth century could be. Michelangelo lived at a time when the old Christian impulses could still affect his soul in terms of their content and greatness, and he then formed from them precisely what, in terms of form and artistic expression, already belongs entirely to the time in which we ourselves live. This created in him the mood of that poem which shows us how we must relate to him and allow him to influence us as a human being — those verses which may well have been written in the last days of his life:

I lie in the harbor we all reach,
Frail was the barque that carried me,
The journey was stormy, but now it is time, in the book
Of life, to settle my account.

Once, art was my happiness, intoxicatingly
Its nectar drenched me, foaming so temptingly,
It was my idol and goddess, and I dreamed,
Until I awoke to see what it had given me!

Destruction rolls toward me twice over;
Death, which now takes me away, without mercy,
And after it, that eternal death full of terror!

Marble and colors give no rest,
Only one thing gives comfort: to look at those poor souls,
Who stretch out to us from the cross.

Michelangelo was also a great poet. What has come down to us of his poetry shows the same spirit that we find in his sculptures and paintings. And so he felt at the end of his life! And yet we see from this poem what lived and had to live in his soul in order to take on such a form, which tells us so eloquently of the greatest mystery of the world, for example in the prophets and sibyls, in the creation of the world, in the Last Judgment, in David, in Moses, and in the Pietà.

The last three lines of the sonnet just read show that there was something in him that was not finished with the world process of humanity; and that was basically in him throughout his life. For he stands, one might say, like a phenomenon of the times, still in the old and already in the new. This is particularly evident in the work he then carried out in Florence under the influence of a later pope: the Medici tombs, which were entrusted to him again to console him for a larger work, namely the continuation of the work on the monument to Julius II. He was to erect tombs for two Medici, Giuliano and Lorenzo. Not only does this chapel, in which the two tombs are located, show us Michelangelo as we know him today in the two sculptures—originally there were supposed to be four—one figure contemplative, the other full of energetic will and dignity. But again in such a way that we have the feeling that at any moment the two figures could rise and act, carrying out what Michelangelo has put into them. But we see something else in this chapel: those four figures, arranged in pairs, which are called “Day” and “Night,” ‘Dawn’ and “Dusk.” I have looked at them often, over and over again. They are among the things I have always looked at the longest, out of an inner spiritual obligation, when I was fortunate enough to be in Florence. And I cannot help it, no matter how fantastic some may find it, I cannot simply see these figures as powerless and lifeless allegories. I tried with all the means that spiritual science provides to think about it: if one is convinced that in human beings, what spiritual science calls the ego and the astral body of the human being leaves the physical body and the etheric body at night, and the etheric body remains behind and powerfully permeates the physical body — how can this be represented, how must the gesture of this etheric body be chosen so that this truth, which emerges precisely through spiritual science, is also represented externally in a plastic form? How must the sleeping human being be represented if one feels him or her in the true sense of spiritual scientific representation? Well, one must depict him as Michelangelo depicted “Night”! Reality, but reality in the spiritual sense, not an allegory or a symbol of night, but the real sleeping human being, as understood through spiritual research, lies before us in this female figure, down to the gesture of the hand, the arms, and the leg. The man who knew so well how to place the figures of his works of art in the same space in which we ourselves stand also knew what significance it has in space when the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being has left the physical-bodily aspect, but the latter is still animated. And when I examine how the individual limbs of the human being behave, and then look at the other figures, I see how they correspond to what I once called “spiritual chemistry,” how I have analyzed this spiritual chemistry; they stand before me in this creation by Michelangelo. Spiritual realism in the highest degree!

Even to those who stand on the ground of spiritual science in the narrower sense, who would like to see these spiritual scientific truths imprinted on the culture of humanity, Michelangelo is still close, because he stands at the beginning of that age which, after other, earlier times had had other tasks, had the task of seeking precisely that inner life which at first lay only in the religious inner life of Christianity, and which today lies in finding the human soul in its own ego connected with the soul that surges and swells through the universe. Michelangelo stands at the starting point of this age – there, where he stood isolated from the outside world in the lonely Medici Chapel, working all alone, often at night, undermining his health, so that people were afraid of his appearance, as he was completely emaciated and could hardly move his legs. But he was still strong enough to return to Rome afterwards and carry out his other works. As he worked there, the forces we are seeking again in spiritual science were already at work within him. That is why he is so close to us. And perhaps he is closest to us when we immerse ourselves completely in these four figures, which are not allegorical but realistic, and which allow the spiritual in human beings to be as much a part of our being and life as Michelangelo did earlier in connection with the outer body in Moses and David, and as he succeeded in imprinting color and form on his paintings in the Sistine Chapel.

So we can safely say what I have often mentioned before: spiritual science feels in harmony with the best longings and hopes of those spirits of humanity who were close to the spiritual being and work itself. In Michelangelo, it confronts us in a grandiose way. If we start from this point of view and want to approach him personally in his soul, then we must say to ourselves: At first, this human soul could only believe that it was placed in earthly existence only once and could not carry the fruits of this earthly existence into the future of human development. This transition point had to be passed through before the teaching of repeated earthly lives could take effect, which present humanity can truly be ready to accept if it so desires. So let us look at Michelangelo and remind ourselves once again how he himself — already bearing within him the distinct characteristics of the time in which we now find ourselves — was nevertheless unable to cope with the world process to which he himself had contributed so much:

I lie in the harbor we all reach,
Frail was the boat that carried me,
Stormy was the journey, but now it's time to focus on the book
To settle my account with life.
Marble and colors give no rest,
Only one thing gives comfort: to look at those poor souls
Stretching out toward us from the cross.

In addition to all this, we have the certainty that spiritual science can give us: that what has been given to the human process in such a meaningful way, as Michelangelo has given, is imperishable, that the fruits of it will live on and on in other lives of this unique soul itself, and that what is once imprinted on the earth cannot be lost to it.

May our present age understand this teaching of repeated earthly lives as little as Michelangelo's age understood his paintings in the Sistine Chapel, by dressing the unclothed figures; may our age regard this truth as ridiculous and fantastic: it is precisely the greatest minds who teach us vividly how the meaning of life is fulfilled by our ability to look back on repeated earthly lives and carry over what has been experienced in ancient epochs of humanity into new and ever newer epochs. And when Goethe said that nature invented death so that it could have much life, spiritual science says: Not only did the world invent death so that it could have much life, but so that it could have an ever richer and higher life! But this is the only thought that we can find worthy of being placed alongside such thoughts as arise when we contemplate works of art such as those of Michelangelo.