The independent Cellini writes in his memoirs: "I devoted myself continually to trying to absorb thoroughly the beautiful style of Michelangelo, and since then I have never departed from it."
A hundred years later still Bernini copied the Last Judgment for two successive years before he began to draw from nature. Scivoli watched him doing it and said: "Sei un furbo; no fai quel che vedi: questa è di Michelangelo." ("You are a fool. You are not drawing what you see; this is nothing but Michelangelo").[152]
Bernini, who tells of this, does not see that it is a criticism, for he recommends this same system of education to young artists.
"It is necessary first for a young man to form an idea of the beautiful, for this is of use to him all his life; it ruins young men to begin by drawing from nature, which is almost always weak and mean, and which then fills their imagination, so that they can never produce anything beautiful or great, qualities which are never found in natural things. Those who make use of nature should be already skilful enough to recognise its faults and to correct them. A young man is not capable of this until he has gained full knowledge of beauty."[153]
The essential idea of this teaching was that nature is evil; just what Michelangelo thought. But we now see to what unexpected results his pessimistic idealism led. It produced not only separation from nature, but renunciation of personal feeling for formulas, "since it is not possible for one individual to have light on all subjects nor to grasp without assistance the difficulty of arts so profound and so little understood."
What would Michelangelo have thought of these servile disciples, he who said proudly that "whoever follows others will never go forward, and whoever does not know how to create by his own abilities can gain no profit from the works of other men."
But they had lost even the consciousness of their servility and took more pride in living on Michelangelo's crumbs than he had in creating the work which was to be the nourishment of two centuries. Some drew tranquilly on their memory and their notes, others mimicked the master's grandiose manner, and they were all entirely satisfied with themselves, not one of them realising what their master and model had suffered in giving birth to these works which were so easy for them to imitate.