In Pheidias we find a large impartiality.  His men and women are cast in the same mould of grandeur, inspired with equal strength and sweetness, antiphonal notes in dual harmony.  Praxiteles leans to the female, Lysippus to the male; and so, through all the gamut of the figurative craftsmen, we discover more or less affinity for man or woman.  One is swayed by woman and her gracefulness, the other by man and his vigour.  Few have realised the Pheidian perfection of doing equal justice.

Michelangelo emerges as a mighty master who was dominated by the vision of male beauty, and who saw the female mainly through the fascination of the other sex.  The defect of his art is due to a certain constitutional callousness, a want of sensuous or imaginative sensibility for what is specifically feminine.

Not a single woman carved or painted by the hand of Michelangelo has the charm of early youth or the grace of virginity.  The Eve of the Sistine, the Madonna of S. Peter’s, the Night and Dawn of the Medicean Sacristy, are female in the anatomy of their large and grandly modelled forms, but not feminine in their sentiment.  This proposition requires no proof.  It is only needful to recall a Madonna by Raphael, a Diana by Correggio, a Leda by Lionardo, a Venus by Titian, a S. Agnes by Tintoretto.  We find ourselves immediately in a different region—­the region of artists who loved, admired, and comprehended what is feminine in the beauty and the temperament of women.  Michelangelo neither loved, nor admired, nor yielded to the female sex.  Therefore he could not deal plastically with what is best and loveliest in the female form.  His plastic ideal of the woman is masculine.  He builds a colossal frame of muscle, bone, and flesh, studied with supreme anatomical science.  He gives to Eve the full pelvis and enormous haunches of an adult matron.  It might here be urged that he chose to symbolise the fecundity of her who was destined to be the mother of the human race.  But if this was his meaning, why did he not make Adam a corresponding symbol of fatherhood?  Adam is an adolescent man, colossal in proportions, but beardless, hairless; the attributes of sex in him are developed, but not matured by use.  The Night, for whom no symbolism of maternity was needed, is a woman who has passed through many pregnancies.  Those deeply delved wrinkles on the vast and flaccid abdomen sufficiently indicate this.  Yet when we turn to Michelangelo’s sonnets on Night, we find that he habitually thought of her as a mysterious and shadowy being, whose influence, though potent for the soul, disappeared before the frailest of all creatures bearing light.  The Dawn, again, in her deep lassitude, has nothing of vernal freshness.  Built upon the same type as the Night, she looks like Messalina dragging herself from heavy slumber, for once satiated as well as tired, stricken for once with the conscience of disgust.  When he chose to depict the acts of passion or of sensual