What we mean by the differences between Classic and Romantic art lies in the distinctions I am drawing.  Classicism sacrifices character to breadth.  Romanticism sacrifices breadth to character.  Classic art deals more triumphantly with the body, because the body gains by being broadly treated.  Romantic art deals more triumphantly with the face, because the features lose by being broadly treated.

This brings me back to Mr. Ruskin, who, in another of his treatises, condemns Michelangelo for a want of variety, beauty, feeling, in his heads and faces.  Were this the case, Michelangelo would have little claim to rank as one of the world’s chief artists.  We have admitted that the Italians did not produce such perfectly beautiful bodes and limbs as the Greeks did, and have agreed that the Greeks produced less perfectly beautiful faces than the Italians.  Suppose, then, that Michelangelo failed in his heads and faces, he, being an Italian, and therefore confessedly inferior to the Greeks in his bodies and limbs, must, by the force of logic, emerge less meritorious than we thought him.

VII

To many of my readers the foregoing section will appear superfluous, polemical, sophistic—­three bad things.  I wrote it, and I let it stand, however, because it serves as preface to what I have to say in general about Michelangelo’s ideal of form.  He was essentially a Romantic as opposed to a Classic artist.  That is to say, he sought invariably for character—­character in type, character in attitude, character in every action of each muscle, character in each extravagance of pose.  He applied the Romantic principle to the body and the limbs, exactly to that region of the human form which the Greeks had conquered as their province.  He did so with consummate science and complete mastery of physiological law.  What is more, he compelled the body to become expressive, not, as the Greeks had done, of broad general conceptions, but of the most intimate and poignant personal emotions.  This was his main originality.  At the same time, being a Romantic, he deliberately renounced the main tradition of that manner.  He refused to study portraiture, as Vasari tells us, and as we see so plainly in the statues of the Dukes at Florence.  He generalised his faces, composing an ideal cast of features out of several types.  In the rendering of the face and head, then, he chose to be a Classic, while in the treatment of the body he was vehemently modern.  In all his work which is not meant to be dramatic—­that is, excluding the damned souls in the Last Judgment, the bust of Brutus, and some keen psychological designs—­character is sacrificed to a studied ideal of form, so far as the face is concerned.  That he did this wilfully, on principle, is certain.  The proof remains in the twenty heads of those incomparable genii of the Sistine, each one of whom possesses a beauty and a quality peculiar to himself alone.  They show that, if he had so chosen, he could have played upon the human countenance with the same facility as on the human body, varying its expressiveness ad infinitum.