Prophets, and Apostles, Michael Angelo had conceived what afterwards found expression on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Of these it is perhaps to be lamented that the figure of Moses, the unplastic nature of whose horns and beard rendered him peculiarly unfitted to be seen alone, should, for the sake of a profane compliment to the pope, have been first taken in hand. We must remember, too, that even that portion of the monument to which he was destined would not have formed its principal feature. It is evident that the grand nude figures, of which the Slaves are a specimen, would have been, both in themselves and from their relation to the spectator's eye, the prominent part of the design; thus again indicating that sagacity in the great master which led him to reserve the principal objects for the qualities in which he most excelled.

In the Medici monuments we arrive at the most unalloyed, and, on that account, at the least legible emanation of Michael Angelo's genius. He was nearly sixty years of age when the commission was undertaken, nearly seventy when it was completed the maturity of his power being as protracted as its manhood had been premature. The recumbent male and female figures at the feet of each duke are the purest development of subjective art the world has perhaps seen. The idea of sleep, conveyed by one of them, has given conventional names to all, yet without the more uniting the others in the sequence of the same thought, or connecting any one of them with the finely portrayed, though strangely selected representatives of the House of Medici above. Sleeping or waking, dawning or setting, watching or resting, these figures lie there, like the grand types of some forgotten fable, surviving all clue to their meaning, and even extinguishing all desire for it. All that we see and know is, that Michael Angelo retired into the innermost temple of his mind to bring them forth, and hence the novelty and the grandeur, the vagueness and the incomprehensibility which render them most true to himself.

Some theory, however, may be suggested on the nature of that mind itself in its converse with art-a very important distinction in one who carried the vague character of his art into no other phase of his life. As we have said before, the human figure was the sole object that filled the eye of Michael Angelo-yet not the figure, either real or ideal, as we see it in nature or in the antique, but a Titanic being replete with physical power, and too grandly rudimental to have attained even the nicer distinctions of individual character. Not only did this broad and primeval image of man occupy his eye to the exclusion of landscape, architecture, drapery (in its proper sense), and all other outward forms, but to the exclusion in great measure of that which we

consider

It

consider the crown and glory of the human structure-the head itself. Why else the absence of all variety, and even, with every limb enormously developed, of sufficient size, form, and marking in so many of Michael Angelo's heads? His faces are devoid of meaning, his heads, with scarcely an exception, too small and shallow for his faces.* At that very climax of the work where character begins, his interest appears to cease. Here, therefore, we have a key to that vagueness which especially pervades the great master's sculpture. No matter how grandly developed the anatomy of the figure, it gives in Michael Angelo's hand no sense of individuality. Everybody has dorsal muscles; there is no speciality in the prominence of a clavicle-the most perfectly formed flexors and extensors tell us nothing. is to his triumph over anatomy, mechanically speaking, that his comparative indifference to the special beauties of the head may be attributed. Up to the strong throat-muscles in man, and, with him, equally in woman, the figure is all Michael Angelo; beyond that we are driven to a succession of negatives in endeavouring to characterise a form of human countenance which is not real-not individual, not intellectual, not spiritual, and, if abstract, not in the sense which the antique teaches. What wonder, therefore, that no portrait, either in colour or marble, should be known to exist by his hand; not (we venture to differ from Mr. Harford, who here adopts the insincere flattery of Vasari) because no human head he ever saw corresponded with his ideas of perfect beauty, but because the true rendering of any natural head demanded a feeling of imitation and observation which lay without the pale of his art-sympathies. Vasari speaks his more honest sentiments in the Life of Jacopo Sansovino, whom he admits to be superior to Michael Angelo in the cast of his draperies, in children, ‘e nell' arie delle donne.'

The vigorous dash of the chisel, so prominent in his unfinished works, makes it interesting to inquire in what mode this iron hand really worked. And the description by an eye-witness, quoted by Mr. Harford, at once proves that the very word 'chisel,' now little more than a conventional term when applied to a master sculptor, became a reality of the most astonishing kind in Michael Angelo's case.

'I may say that I have seen Michael Angelo at work after he had passed his sixtieth year; and although he was not very robust, he cut away as many scales from a block of very hard marble in a quarter of an hour as three young sculptors would have effected in three or four

*The head of the David is an exception in this respect, being rather large in proportion, yet without giving the figure the character of youth.

Vol. 103.-No. 206.

2 I

hours

hours a thing almost incredible to one who had not actually witnessed it. Such was the impetuosity and fire with which he pursued his labour, that I almost thought the whole work must have gone to pieces; with a single stroke he brought down fragments three or four fingers thick, and so close upon his mark that, had he passed it even in the slightest degree, there would have been a danger of ruining the whole; since any such injury, unlike the case of works in plaster or stucco, would have been irreparable.'

Something of this fearlessness may be traced to the unstinted riot of his chisel in the white marble mountains of Carrara. Thorwaldsen once told us that the Carrarese workmen in his studio surpassed all others in the boldness with which they used the tool-knocking away the marble,' he said, 'like so much cheese.' There is reason also to think that Michael Angelo availed himself little of those simple geometrical appliances to which it is known the ancient sculptors resorted, and by which an inferior hand may translate the most elaborate clay model into marble. He was accustomed to say, borrowing an antique phrase, that the sculptor should carry his compasses in his eye;' and several of his works-the face of the Saviour in the Pietà, the foot of the Moses, and the hand of the same figure upon his breast, and the hand and arm placed behind the Madonna in the Medici chapel-show that miscalculation in the size of his block which resulted from this reliance. It may be concluded in these instances that he worked the marble from models of a smaller size, for Benvenuto Cellini says that, 'having experimented in both ways—that is, in making statues from small and from large models-Michael Angelo was at last convinced of the difference, and adhered to the practice of the large models, as it happened to me to witness in Florence while he was working upon the Medici monument.' *

In natural connection with his exultant use of the chisel follows the wonderful facility of line displayed by his drawings. His hand had learnt the human form by heart, and obeyed the motions of his will with a readiness analogous to the freedom of speech itself. The hand drawn at once with the pen, by way of sign-manual, to prove to the emissary of the Cardinal di San Giorgio what he could do; † the unmistakeable sign of his presence in the form of the colossal head left in the before empty lunette in the saloon of the Galatea in the Farnesina, to show Sebastian del Piombo who had mounted the scaffolding during

* Cicognara, vol. v. p. 171, note 2nd.

The drawing of a hand preserved in Paris, and which is known by the engraved facsimile, is not admitted by connoisseurs to be the sketch referred to. The head in the Farnesina is less questionable, though some have ascribed it to that not very expert designer, Sebastian del Piombo himself.

his absence; the figure of the standing Hercules, designed, as kindly as instantaneously, in a shed near S. Pietro in Vincoli, for a young Ferrarese potter who had done him service, all show the burning rapidity with which the mental image was thrown upon any surface that stood ready to receive it. In these feats, however, judging from the head still preserved in the Farnesina, whatever the marvel, there is no mystery. The eye follows the splendid calligraphy of his will, and, however surprised, comprehends the result which ensues. But his more deliberately executed studies have a higher power over us. Here the utter dis

parity of means to end entails that feeling with which we regard a thing above our comprehension. There is nothing to be said. before such a Madonna as that preserved in a little side-room in the Casa Buonarroti. Common coarse paper and slight blurs of red and black chalk appear inadequate to produce the miracle of roundness, gradation, and power which rises from them: the impression of the master's strength growing in proportion to the seeming insufficiency of the materials employed.

Nude

There can be little question that in the destruction of the Cartoon of Pisa the chef-d'œuvre, not only of Michael Angelo but of all that human hand has ever produced in such a form, was lost to the world. It was executed in his thirtieth year, when he may be said to have been elate with the possession of his recently-acquired anatomical powers, and eager to display them in a subject which gave them a magnificent field. The cartoon was a new revelation in the history of art! figures, just roused from bathing by the alarm of the enemy, and conceived in every form of hasty preparation: some scarce risen from the water, others hurrying on such clothes as were within reach; others again, forgetting all but the note of war and flying naked to the combat with nothing but a weapon-such a task had never been before attempted, and was produced at once in the utmost perfection. It raised a tumult of astonishment in the artist-world not surpassed, if equalled, by any of his other great achievements, and was studied and copied by a longer list of pictorial celebrities, including the youthful Raphael, than afterwards did homage even to the Sistine ceiling. For this reason, as Vasari says, having become the centre of study as well as of admiration, it was removed from the council chamber into the Casa Medici-now the Riccardi—and placed in the great hall above. The question naturally ensues, How comes such a work of art, so placed, so extolled, so studied, to have been destroyed before the novelty of its beauty had even palled upon the Florentine eyes? The outrage is attributed to the envy of Baccio Bandinelli--he who was considered the best copyist who had

sat before it ;-but such a deed could not have been done in a corner, nor without the assistance and connivance of many accomplices. The cartoon, mechanically speaking, was no slight thing to attack. Vasari calls it 'grandissimo' in size, and we know that it contained nineteen figures which may be pronounced to have been the size of life. Gaye (vol. ii. pp. 92-3) shows, from Florentine records, that fourteen quires of royal Bolognese folio had been supplied for it by a paper-merchant; that two workmen had been employed to put it together, and that three planks of deal had been paid for to protect it in some way. Such a surface must have been stretched upon a strong framework. Vasari says that the Duke Giuliano-he whom Michael Angelo immortalised on one of the Medici monuments- was ill, and that the palace was being restored for the reception of a new governor. But such a residence could not be left at any time without guards. The fact is, that, though art might be lauded and cried up with empty panegyric and far-fetched praise, it commanded no real intelligence, and therefore no real respect. Leonardo da Vinci's famous model of his equestrian statue fell a prey to brutal Gascon bowmen in time of war. Michael Angelo's cartoon was destroyed in a saloon, which it had converted into an academy of art, in the midst of peace. The first was a misfortune which might happen anywhere during a period of violence and foreign occupation, the latter a disgrace which may serve to open our eyes as to the true atmosphere' of the farfamed Medicean era.

With this cartoon of Pisa perished the only specimen of Michael Angelo's genius in this form. Designs by his hand, both of sacred and profane subjects, form the basis of well-known pictures by Marcello Venusti, Sebastian del Piombo, Pontormo, Daniel da Volterra, and Battista Franco. They do not, however, contribute to the fame of the master; the figures in many of them are clumsy and ungraceful, the compositions unattractive, and the scanty nature of the accessories adds no interest to the scene. In this respect some of these versions of his conceptions strikingly illustrate his inaptitude or antipathy to any forms and objects extraneous to the human frame. The drapery either disguises the figure in puffy and unmeaning masses, with no beauty of its own, or follows it like a skin, with rope-like lines at the principal joints; while an object so tempting to the lover of the classic or picturesque as the Chariot of the Sun is got rid of in the Fall of Phaeton, under the form of a mere shallow trough with four equal sides.

It is not to be expected in these days, when many a tyro in architectural science is unwilling even to admit Palladio