intended by that host of plastic shapes evoked from his imagination.  The triumphant leaders of the crew, the twenty lads who sit upon their consoles, sustaining medallions by ribands which they lift, have been variously and inconclusively interpreted.  In the long row of Michelangelo’s creations, those young men are perhaps the most significant—­athletic adolescents, with faces of feminine delicacy and poignant fascination.  But it serves no purpose to inquire what they symbolise.  If we did so, we should have to go further, and ask, What do the bronze figures below them, twisted into the boldest attitudes the human frame can take, or the twinned children on the pedestals, signify?  In this region, the region of pure plastic play, when art drops the wand of the interpreter and allows physical beauty to be a law unto itself, Michelangelo demonstrated that no decorative element in the hand of a really supreme master is equal to the nude.

Previous artists, with a strong instinct for plastic as opposed to merely picturesque effect, had worked upon the same line.  Donatello revelled in the rhythmic dance and stationary grace of children.  Luca Signorelli initiated the plan of treating complex ornament by means of the mere human body; and for this reason, in order to define the position of Michelangelo in Italian art-history, I shall devote the next section of this chapter to Luca’s work at Orvieto.  But Buonarroti in the Sistine carried their suggestions to completion.  The result is a mapped-out chart of living figures—­a vast pattern, each detail of which is a masterpiece of modelling.  After we have grasped the intellectual content of the whole, the message it was meant to inculcate, the spiritual meaning present to the maker’s mind, we discover that, in the sphere of artistic accomplishment, as distinct from intellectual suggestion, one rhythm of purely figurative beauty has been carried throughout—­from God creating Adam to the boy who waves his torch above the censer of the Erythrean sibyl.

IV

Of all previous painters, only Luca Signorelli deserves to be called the forerunner of Michelangelo, and his Chapel of S. Brizio in the Cathedral at Orvieto in some remarkable respects anticipates the Sistine.  This eminent master was commissioned in 1499 to finish its decoration, a small portion of which had been begun by Fra Angelico.  He completed the whole Chapel within the space of two years; so that the young Michelangelo, upon one of his journeys to or from Rome, may probably have seen the frescoes in their glory.  Although no visit to Orvieto is recorded by his biographers, the fame of these masterpieces by a man whose work at Florence had already influenced his youthful genius must certainly have attracted him to a city which lay on the direct route from Tuscany to the Campagna.