treatment of Dante, whose genius seems to have exerted at least as strong an influence over Signorelli’s imagination as over that of Michelangelo.  The episodes from the Divine Comedy are painted in a rude Gothic spirit.  The spirits of Hell seem borrowed from grotesque bas-reliefs of the Pisan school.  The draped, winged, and armed angels of Heaven are posed with a ceremonious research of suavity or grandeur.  These and other features of his work carry us back to the period of Giotto and Niccolo Pisano.  But the true force of the man, what made him a commanding master of the middle period, what distinguished him from all his fellows of the quattrocento, is the passionate delight he took in pure humanity—­the nude, the body studied under all its aspects and with no repugnance for its coarseness—­man in his crudity made the sole sufficient object for figurative art, anatomy regarded as the crowning and supreme end of scientific exploration.  It is this in his work which carries us on toward the next age, and justifies our calling Luca “the morning-star of Michelangelo.”

It would be wrong to ascribe too much to the immediate influence of the elder over the younger artist—­at any rate in so far as the frescoes of the Chapel of S. Brizio may have determined the creation of the Sistine.  Yet Vasari left on record that “even Michelangelo followed the manner of Signorelli, as any one may see.”  Undoubtedly, Buonarroti, while an inmate of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s palace at Florence, felt the power of Luca’s Madonna with the naked figures in the background; the leading motive of which he transcended in his Doni Holy Family.  Probably at an early period he had before his eyes the bold nudities, uncompromising designs, and awkward composition of Luca’s so-called School of Pan.  In like manner, we may be sure that during his first visit to Rome he was attracted by Signorelli’s solemn fresco of Moses in the Sistine.  These things were sufficient to establish a link of connection between the painter of Cortona and the Florentine sculptor.  And when Michelangelo visited the Chapel of S. Brizio, after he had fixed and formed his style (exhibiting his innate force of genius in the Pieta, the Bacchus, the Cupid, the David, the statue of Julius, the Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa), that early bond of sympathy must have been renewed and enforced.  They were men of a like temperament, and governed by kindred aesthetic instincts.  Michelangelo brought to its perfection that system of working wholly through the human form which Signorelli initiated.  He shared his violence, his terribilita, his almost brutal candour.  In the fated evolution of Italian art, describing its parabola of vital energy, Michelangelo softened, sublimed, and harmonised his predecessor’s qualities.  He did this by abandoning Luca’s naivetes and crudities; exchanging his savage transcripts from coarse life for profoundly studied idealisations of form; subordinating his rough and casual design to schemes of balanced composition, based on architectural relations; penetrating the whole accomplished work, as he intended it should be, with a solemn and severe strain of unifying intellectual melody.