Steeped in the text of the Bible, the discourses of Plato, and the poems of Dante ; brooding over the fiery sermons of Savonarola ; he found Solitude his best companion for mighty thinking. Entertaining few friends, and shunning the society which was the joy of Raphael, his solitary work upon the Sistine Chapel stands out in strange contrast with Raphael at work amongst a crowd of assistants. To his eager soul, Liberty was the flame, his country was his child, his passionate love of justice a stern incentive. Grim and biting of speech he was-and, likely enough, folk flinched from his critical eye. Perugino he bluntly pushed aside as goffo, a dunderhead in art. Looking upon a handsome youth, when told that he was the artist Francia's son, he grimly answered, "Your father makes better men by night than by day."

So, Michelangelo, an intensely devoted son of his Church, stepped beyond the limits of the thinking from which that Church now shrank, and boldly accepted ancient philosophy with his faith. His art is the full utterance of what the Renaissance should have been to Italy-but Italy flinched from it. In the great upheaval of the Reformation, the Church entered into a struggle with the North and lost ; but she awoke to the more astute policies of the Counter Reformation, and saved the Latin peoples to herself. The schism of the North drove the [233] Papacy, which had aforetime led thought, into blind enmity to advancing ideals ; and the vast dome of St. Peter's, that is Michelangelo's supreme achievement in architecture, which should have been the home of the union of faith with the leaders of the new culture, welcoming progress and science that its pontiffs created by their fostering care, lost its wider significance as the shrine of the Christian world, and narrowed its dominion over the hearts of man.

Yet the pontiffs of the Church might well shrink from the state of affairs into which the new Paganism was leading the old and simple faith. The overwhelming genius of Michelangelo is blamed as having been so vast that it left nothing but hordes of imitators to debauch its significance. To say this is wholly to misunderstand the age. Michelangelo's supreme gifts uttered themselves in an age wherein decay was on every side. Literature was sunk into mere academic pedantries and frivolities, or into the obscenities of such as Aretino. Michelangelo dwarfs such men in the eyes of history ; but once his splendour was removed, there was nothing but the mediocre or vicious ineptitude of the Italy of the age to take its place. In the realm of painting, these mediocre artists naturally essayed to employ Michelangelo's methods ; but like all academic effort, they only exaggerated his faults, and were too puny to understand his significance. Their Michelangelesque efforts, however, are not to be mistaken for the real effort that, throughout Italy, during the next century, was made to develop the range of painting, but has been flung into the middle of the Decadence by the muddled incapacity of the writers to grasp its artistic significance. But of that, later.

Michelangelo compelled the art of Sculpture to its utmost powers along the limits of line, which the Greeks [234] had developed, until he made it utter his passionate sensing and profound imagination. He compelled painting, so far as the genius of Central Italy had developed its gamut of utterance-that is to say, in the realm of drawing and line -until he could employ the whole wide gamut of the Central Italian orchestration to give forth his imagery in terms of paint employed in the spirit of sculpture. With such sublime power and august vision did he achieve this sombre splendour, that his majestic art completely exhausted the whole potentialities of the Florentine genius and craftsmanship, and left it nothing more to say. In the very act of his supreme endeavour and accomplishment, Michelangelo revealed the limitations of the Florentine genius, even whilst he proved what a Titan could do within those limitations.

It is for this very reason that all after-endeavour of the succeeding years, all attempt to-day-and the folly is widespread-to go back to the Florentines for the craftsmanship of painting, is bound to failure ; for not only has the Italian genius uttered itself once for all in supreme fashion, and therefore made modern rivalry of it absurd, but the artist of to-day can never hope to surpass in an artificial effort what was achieved by the giants in a language that was their natural speech.

And even whilst we stand amazed and in homage before the mighty masterpieces of the Florentine achievement in art, it is ever well to keep in mind that, great as it was, the art of painting has developed and advanced to heights of emotional utterance, of which even Michelangelo never dreamed. What the Italians were digging out of craftsmanship with prodigious labour, is now the possession of any gifted student. And he who looks upon the masterpieces of the great dead, and considers them the [235] complete and ultimate achievement of art, is wholly incapable of receiving the thrill of artistic impression, and is simply the product of the pedant and the book-learned critic.

Michelangelo stands out a giant amidst giants-his terrible and sublime art towering above the achievement of his age. He is the mighty tragedian, the great dramatist of Italy. He had the virile brain and strong right hand to save his people, but they could not and would not understand him. Just as the frivolous spirit of the people was content with sacerdotalism as their religion, and found Raphael's pleasing and genial art " divine," and stood aside in homage when the young gallant, arrayed like a prince and with a princely retinue, passed in the streets of Rome ; so they looked askance at the grim and deep-soul'd man who went by in lonely moodiness, his eyes troubled with the loss of real liberty under the trappings of splendour. So bookish men find " beauty " in Raphael's prettier art, and miss the awful significance of Michelangelo's far mightier essence.

It is easy to understand how Michelangelo, when the Laocoon was discovered in 1506, greeted it as "a miracle of art." Here was a work of art that fitted his own Italy. He employed the nude human figure as the supreme design of God's hand ; and it was significant of the real state of Italy that the censure of an indecent and trivial poet should have led to the " purification " of Michelangelo's art by the " Maker of Breeches." The human form was his delight- " Nor hath God deigned to show Himself elsewhere more clearly than in human forms sublime, which, since they image Him, alone I love." He bent his strong will to master its every detail, dissecting the dead, though " it turned [236] his stomach so that he could neither eat nor drink with benefit." The human form he employed for every decoration-indeed, it was the whole symbol through which he uttered the emotions ; whether he felt the profound tragedy of life, its sublime essence, its majestic possibilities, the vast significance and terrible mystery of it all, it was in terms of the human body that he uttered these things.

His eye and hand were so creative, his skill so certain, his calculation so sure, that he saw at once what a block of marble would yield to his wondrous chisel ; as though the masterpiece lay entombed therein but awaiting its release at his hands, he set to work upon the rough-hewn block with forthright will that never hesitated ; the splinters flew under his reckless skill, as he cut down to the figure that came to life under his astounding wizardry. There is witness that in his old age he would cut away more waste marble from the block in a quarter of an hour than three younger men in a couple of hours ; and, as he sang, " when my rude hammer to the stubborn stone gives human shape," his daring chisel would so closely follow the forms of the figure that rapidly came into being, that the slightest error would have wrecked the whole. It need only be remembered that the great David was hewn straight from the marble without any model of clay whatsoever. So with his painting. We know that he entered upon his work in the Sistine Chapel on the l0th of the May of 1508-and had finished the ceiling on the 1st of November 1509-but even this colossal achievement of a large number of figures, many ten feet high, was done within these eighteen months, for it is said that he dismissed all pupils, destroyed the work, and started alone on the January of that year-if so, creating this vast work in ten months. Fresco can only be worked upon whilst wet, so that every [237] day's painting reveals itself-Sir Charles Holroyd, on making careful examination of the sublime figure of Adam in the Creation, found that it was painted in three days' work.

His body's strength must have been prodigious. So cramped was his powerful frame by painting the vast ceiling above his face in the Sistine Chapel, that, for some time afterwards, he had to place a book or manuscript above his head to read it. " I've grown a goitre by dwelling in this den "-his sonnet runs : "... My beard turns up to heaven ; my nape falls in, fixed on my spine. ... A rich broidery bedews my face from brush-dips thick and thin ; my loins into my paunch like levers grind. . . . False and quaint, I know, must be the fruit of squinting brain and eye ; for, ill can aim the gun that bends awry. . . . Foul I fare, and painting is my shame."

Michelangelo was a supreme draughtsman. He produced out of sheer line an intensity of feeling that is akin to the deep resonance of a mighty organ. His whole art was founded on form-on line. Well might he write on the drawing of his pupil Antonio Mini : " Draw, Antonio ; draw, Antonio ; draw, and waste no time " ; his urging to his pupils, like Donatello's, was ever, " I give you the whole art of sculpture when I tell you-draw ! "