1531.[1] Supreme irony! Nobody understood them. A Giovanni Strozzi, seeing the formidable "Night," composed such epigrams as the following:
"Night, whom you see so sweetly sleeping in this stone, was by an Angel carved, and since she sleeps, she lives: if you believe me not, awake her, and she will speak."[2]
Michael Angelo replied:
"Sleep is dear to me, but dearer still to me it is to be a stone, while shame is shameless and while crimes bear sway. To neither see nor hear is my good fortune, therefore rouse me not, but speak low."[3]
"Is all heaven deep in slumber," he cries in another poem, "since a single being has appropriated the wealth of so many men?"
And the enslaved Florence replies to his moans:[4]
"Be not troubled in your holy thoughts. He who
- ↑ "Night" was probably carved in the autumn of 1530 and finished in the spring of 1531; "Dawn" in September 1531; "Twilight" and "Day" a little later. (See Dr. Ernst Steinmann's "Das Geheimnis der Medicigräber Michel Angelos," 1907, Hiersemann, Leipzig.)
- ↑
"La notte che tu vedi in si dolci atti
Dormir, fu da un Angelo scolpita.
In questo sasso, e perche dorme, ha vita:
Destala se nol credi, e parleratti." - ↑
"Caro m’è ’l sonno et piu l’esser di sasso,
Mentre che ’l danno e la vergogna dura.
Non veder, non sentir m’è gran ventura;
Pero non mi destar, deh! parla basso!"(Poems, cix, 16, 17. Frey dates them 1545.) - ↑ Michael Angelo imagines a dialogue between Florence and the banished Florentines.
