of Michelangelo’s attention during his old age, we find an intense and pathetic sympathy with the sorrows of Mary, expressed with noble dignity and a pious sense of godhead in the human mother.  It will be remarked that throughout the cases I have reserved as exceptions, it is not woman in her plastic beauty and her radiant charm that Michelangelo has rendered, but woman in her tranquil or her saddened and sorrow-stricken moods.  What he did not comprehend and could not represent was woman in her girlishness, her youthful joy, her physical attractiveness, her magic of seduction.

Michelangelo’s women suggest demonic primitive beings, composite and undetermined products of the human race in evolution, before the specific qualities of sex have been eliminated from a general predominating mass of masculinity.  At their best, they carry us into the realm of Lucretian imagination.  He could not have incarnated in plastic form Shakespeare’s Juliet and Imogen, Dante’s Francesca da Rimini, Tasso’s Erminia and Clorinda; but he might have supplied a superb illustration to the opening lines of the Lucretian epic, where Mars lies in the bed of Venus, and the goddess spreads her ample limbs above her Roman lover.  He might have evoked images tallying the vision of primal passion in the fourth book of that poem.  As I have elsewhere said, writing about Lucretius:  “There is something almost tragic in these sighs and pantings and pleasure-throes, these incomplete fruitions of souls pent within their frames of flesh.  We seem to see a race of men and women such as never lived, except perhaps in Rome or in the thought of Michelangelo, meeting in leonine embracements that yield pain, whereof the climax is, at best, relief from rage and respite for a moment from consuming fire.  There is a life elemental rather than human in those mighty limbs; and the passion that twists them on the marriage-bed has in it the stress of storms, the rampings and roarings of leopards at play.  Take this single line:—­

  et Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum.

What a picture of primeval breadth and vastness!  The forest is the world, and the bodies of the lovers are things natural and unashamed, and Venus is the tyrannous instinct that controls the blood in spring.”

What makes Michelangelo’s crudity in his plastic treatment of the female form the more remarkable is that in his poetry he seems to feel the influence of women mystically.  I shall have to discuss this topic in another place.  It is enough here to say that, with very few exceptions, we remain in doubt whether he is addressing a woman at all.  There are none of those spontaneous utterances by which a man involuntarily expresses the outgoings of his heart to a beloved object, the throb of irresistible emotion, the physical ache, the sense of wanting, the joys and pains, the hopes and fears, the ecstasies and disappointments, which belong to genuine passion.  The woman is, for him, an allegory, something he has not approached and handled.  Of her personality we learn nothing.  Of her bodily presentment, the eyes alone are mentioned; and the eyes are treated as the path to Paradise for souls which seek emancipation from the flesh.  Raffaello’s few and far inferior sonnets vibrate with an intense and potent sensibility to this woman or to that.