which express the tender and delicate feelings, those which the divine pencil of Raphael so admirably represented.  I own that he took little heed of the pleasurable aspect of things; his austere genius was at ease only in grave thoughts; but I do not agree that he was always a stranger to gentle beauty, to feminine beauty in particular.  I shall not cite the “Virgin” of the London Academy, nor in another order the admirable “Captive” of the Louvre Museum; but, without quitting the Sistine, could we dream of anything more marvellously beautiful than his “Adam” awaking for the first time to light? or more chaste, more graceful, more touching than his young “Eve” leaning toward her Creator, and breathing in through her half-opened lips the divine breath that is giving her life?

What is the meaning of this terrible work?  What means this long evolution of human destiny?  Why did these two beings that we see beautiful and happy in the beginning, why did they people the earth with this ardent, restless, at once gigantic and powerless race?  Ah!  Greece would have made this ceiling an Olympus, inhabited by happy and divine men!  Michelangelo put there great unhappy beings, and this painful poem of humanity is truer than the wondrous fictions of ancient poetry and art.  “Michelangelo,” says Condivi, “especially admired Dante.  He also devoted himself earnestly to the reading of the Scriptures and the writings of Savonarola, for whom he had always great affection, having preserved in his mind the memory of his powerful voice.”  Besides, the country of the great Florentine, the glorious Italy of the Renaissance, was in a state of dissolution.  Such studies, such reminiscences, such and so sad realities, may explain the visions that passed through the mind of the great artist during the four years of almost complete solitude he passed in the Sistine.  The precise meaning of these compositions will probably never be known, but so long as men exist they will, as is the object of art, attract minds toward the dim world of the ideal.

The year that followed the opening of the Sistine, and which preceded the death of Julius, appears, as do the first two of Leo X’s pontificate, to have been the happiest and calmest of Michelangelo’s life.  The old Pope loved him, “showing him,” says Condivi, “attentions he showed no other of those who approached him.”  He honored his probity, and even that independence of character of which he himself had more than once had experience; Michelangelo, on his side, forgave him his frequent outbursts of impetuosity, that were ever atoned for by prompt and complete acknowledgment.