The solitary instance in which Michael Angelo is represented as taking an unfair advantage of an antagonist, is in connection with the painter's rivalry in his art with Raphael. Michael Angelo undervalued the genius of Raphael, and was disgusted by what the older man considered the immoderate admiration bestowed on the younger. A favourite pupil of Michael Angelo's was Sebastian Del Piombo, who being a Venetian by birth was an excellent colourist. For one of his pictures--the very 'Raising of Lazarus' now in the National Gallery, which the Pope had ordered at the same time that he had ordered Raphael's 'Transfiguration'--it is rumoured that Michael Angelo gave the designs and even drew the figures, leaving Sebastian the credit, and trusting that without Michael Angelo's name appearing in the work, by the help of his drawing in addition to Sebastian's superb colouring, Raphael would be eclipsed, and that by a painter comparatively obscure.
The unwarrantable inference that the whole work was that of one painter, constituted a stratagem altogether unworthy of Michael Angelo, and if it had any existence, its getting wind disappointed and foiled its authors. When the story was repeated to Raphael, his sole protest is said to have been to the effect that he was glad that Michael Angelo esteemed him so highly as to enter the lists with him.
We can judge of Michael Angelo's attainments as a poet, even without having recourse to the original Italian, by Wordsworth's translations of some of the Italian master's sonnets, and by Mr John Edward Taylor's translations of selections from Michael Angelo's poems.
Michael Angelo was greater as an architect and a sculptor than as a painter, because his power and delight lay in the mastery of form, and in the assertion, through that mastery, of the idealism of genius. It is not necessary to speak here of the mighty harmonies and the ineffable dignity of simplicity, somewhat marred by the departure from Michael Angelo's designs, in St Peter's. It has been the fashion to praise them to the skies, and it has been a later fashion to decry them, in awarding a preference to the solemn shades and the dim rich dreaminess of Gothic architecture. Both fashions come to this, after all, that beauty, like these great men of genius of old, is many-sided.
