pleasure, a similar want of sympathy with what is feminine in womanhood leaves an even more discordant impression on the mind.  I would base the proof of this remark upon the marble Leda of the Bargello Museum, and an old engraving of Ixion clasping the phantom of Juno under the form of a cloud.  In neither case do we possess Michelangelo’s own handiwork; he must not, therefore, be credited with the revolting expression, as of a drunken profligate, upon the face of Leda.  Yet in both cases he is indubitably responsible for the general design, and for the brawny carnality of the repulsive woman.  I find it difficult to resist the conclusion that Michelangelo felt himself compelled to treat women as though they were another and less graceful sort of males.  The sentiment of woman, what really distinguishes the sex, whether voluptuously or passionately or poetically apprehended, emerges in no eminent instance of his work.  There is a Cartoon at Naples for a Bacchante, which Bronzino transferred to canvas and coloured.  This design illustrates the point on which I am insisting.  An athletic circus-rider of mature years, with abnormally developed muscles, might have posed as model for this female votary of Dionysus.  Before he made this drawing, Michelangelo had not seen those frescoes of the dancing Bacchantes from Pompeii; nor had he perhaps seen the Maenads on Greek bas-reliefs tossing wild tresses backwards, swaying virginal lithe bodies to the music of the tambourine.  We must not, therefore, compare his concept with those masterpieces of the later classical imagination.  Still, many of his contemporaries, vastly inferior to him in penetrative insight, a Giovanni da Udine, a Perino del Vaga, a Primaticcio, not to speak of Raffaello or of Lionardo, felt what the charm of youthful womanhood upon the revel might be.  He remained insensible to the melody of purely feminine lines; and the only reason why his transcripts from the female form are not gross like those of Flemish painters, repulsive like Rembrandt’s, fleshly like Rubens’s, disagreeable like the drawings made by criminals in prisons, is that they have little womanly about them.

Lest these assertions should appear too dogmatic, I will indicate the series of works in which I recognise Michelangelo’s sympathy with genuine female quality.  All the domestic groups, composed of women and children, which fill the lunettes and groinings between the windows in the Sistine Chapel, have a charming twilight sentiment of family life or maternal affection.  They are among the loveliest and most tranquil of his conceptions.  The Madonna above the tomb of Julius II. cannot be accused of masculinity, nor the ecstatic figure of the Rachel beneath it.  Both of these statues represent what Goethe called “das ewig Weibliche” under a truly felt and natural aspect.  The Delphian and Erythrean Sibyls are superb in their majesty.  Again, in those numerous designs for Crucifixions, Depositions from the Cross, and Pietas, which occupied so much