The works of Michael Angelo as a sculptor were not numerous, but in sublimity they have never been surpassed,—­non multa, sed multum.  His unfinished monument of Julius II., begun at that pontiff’s request as a mausoleum, is perhaps his greatest work; and the statue of Moses, which formed a part of it, has been admired for three hundred years.  In this, as in his other masterpieces, grandeur and majesty are his characteristics.  It may have been a reproduction, and yet it is not a copy.  He made character and moral force the first consideration, and form subservient to expression.  And here he differed, it is said by great critics, from the ancients, who thought more of form than of moral expression,—­as may be seen in the faces of the Venus de Medici and the Apollo Belvedere, matchless and inimitable as these statues are in grace and beauty.  The Laocooen and the Dying Gladiator are indeed exceptions, for it is character which constitutes their chief merit,—­the expression of pain, despair, and agony.  But there is almost no intellectual or moral expression in the faces of other famous and remarkable antique statues, only beauty and variety of form, such as Powers exhibited in his Greek Slave,—­an inferior excellence, since it is much easier to copy the beautiful in the nude statues which people Italy, than to express such intellectual majesty as Michael Angelo conceived—­that intellectual expression which Story has succeeded in giving to his African Sibyl.  Thus while the great artist retained the antique, he superadded a loftiness such as the ancients rarely produced; and sculpture became in his hands, not demoralizing and Pagan, resplendent in sensual charms, but instructive and exalting,—­instructive for the marvellous display of anatomical knowledge, and exalting from grand conceptions of dignity and power.  His knowledge of anatomy was so remarkable that he could work without models.  Our artists, in these days, must always have before their eyes some nude figure to copy.

The same peculiarities which have given him fame as a sculptor he carried out into painting, in which he is even more remarkable; for the artists of Italy at this period often combined a skill for all the fine arts.  In sculpture they were much indebted to the ancients, but painting seems to have been purely a development.  In the Middle Ages it was comparatively rude.  No noted painter arose until Cimabue, in the middle of the thirteenth century.  Before him, painting was a lifeless imitation of models afforded by Greek workers in mosaics; but Cimabue abandoned this servile copying, and gave a new expression to heads, and grouped his figures.  Under Giotto, who was contemporary with Dante, drawing became still more correct, and coloring softer.  After him, painting was rapidly advanced.  Pietro della Francesca was the father of perspective; Domenico painted in oil, discovered by Van Eyck in Flanders, in 1410; Masaccio studied anatomy; gilding disappeared as a