Why Michelangelo preferred to generalise the face and to particularise the body remains a secret buried in the abysmal deeps of his personality.  In his studies from the model, unlike Lionardo, he almost always left the features vague, while working out the trunk and limbs with strenuous passion.  He never seems to have been caught and fascinated by the problem offered by the eyes and features of a male or female.  He places masks or splendid commonplaces upon frames palpitant and vibrant with vitality in pleasure or in anguish.

In order to guard against an apparent contradiction, I must submit that, when Michelangelo particularised the body and the limbs, he strove to make them the symbols of some definite passion or emotion.  He seems to have been more anxious about the suggestions afforded by their pose and muscular employment than he was about the expression of the features.  But we shall presently discover that, so far as pure physical type is concerned, he early began to generalise the structure of the body, passing finally into what may not unjustly be called a mannerism of form.

These points may be still further illustrated by what a competent critic has recently written upon Michelangelo’s treatment of form.  “No one,” says Professor Bruecke, “ever knew so well as Michelangelo Buonarroti how to produce powerful and strangely harmonious effects by means of figures in themselves open to criticism, simply by his mode of placing and ordering them, and of distributing their lines.  For him a figure existed only in his particular representation of it; how it would have looked in any other position was a matter of no concern to him.”  We may even go further, and maintain that Michelangelo was sometimes wilfully indifferent to the physical capacities of the human body in his passionate research of attitudes which present picturesque and novel beauty.  The ancients worked on quite a different method.  They created standard types which, in every conceivable posture, would exhibit the grace and symmetry belonging to well-proportioned frames.  Michelangelo looked to the effect of a particular posture.  He may have been seduced by his habit of modelling figures in clay instead of going invariably to the living subject, and so may have handled nature with unwarrantable freedom.  Anyhow, we have here another demonstration of his romanticism.

VIII

The true test of the highest art is that it should rightly represent the human form.  Agreed upon this point, it remains for us to consider in what way Michelangelo conceived and represented the human form.  If we can discover his ideal, his principles, his leading instincts in this decisive matter, we shall unlock, so far as that is possible, the secret of his personality as man and artist.  The psychological quality of every great master must eventually be determined by his mode of dealing with the phenomena of sex.