Michelangelo’s “donna” might just as well be a man; and indeed the poems he addressed to men, though they have nothing sensual about them, reveal a finer touch in the emotion of the writer.  It is difficult to connect this vaporous incorporeal “donna” of the poems with those brawny colossal adult females of the statues, unless we suppose that Michelangelo remained callous both to the physical attractions and the emotional distinction of woman as she actually is.

I have tried to demonstrate that, plastically, he did not understand women, and could not reproduce their form in art with sympathetic feeling for its values of grace, suavity, virginity, and frailty.  He imported masculine qualities into every female theme he handled.  The case is different when we turn to his treatment of the male figure.  It would be impossible to adduce a single instance, out of the many hundreds of examples furnished by his work, in which a note of femininity has been added to the masculine type.  He did not think enough of women to reverse the process, and create hermaphroditic beings like the Apollino of Praxiteles or the S. Sebastian of Sodoma.  His boys and youths and adult men remain, in the truest and the purest sense of the word, virile.  Yet with what infinite variety, with what a deep intelligence of its resources, with what inexhaustible riches of enthusiasm and science, he played upon the lyre of the male nude!  How far more fit for purposes of art he felt the man to be than the woman is demonstrated, not only by his approaching woman from the masculine side, but also by his close attention to none but male qualities in men.  I need not insist or enlarge upon this point.  The fact is apparent to every one with eyes to see.  It would be futile to expound Michelangelo’s fertility in dealing with the motives of the male figure as minutely as I judged it necessary to explain the poverty of his inspiration through the female.  But it ought to be repeated that, over the whole gamut of the scale, from the grace of boyhood, through the multiform delightfulness of adolescence into the firm force of early manhood, and the sterner virtues of adult age, one severe and virile spirit controls his fashioning of plastic forms.  He even exaggerates what is masculine in the male, as he caricatures the female by ascribing impossible virility to her.  But the exaggeration follows here a line of mental and moral rectitude.  It is the expression of his peculiar sensibility to physical structure.

IX

When we study the evolution of Michelangelo’s ideal of form, we find at the beginning of his life a very short period in which he followed the traditions of Donatello and imitated Greek work.  The seated Madonna in bas-relief and the Giovannino belong to this first stage.  So does the bas-relief of the Centaurs.  It soon becomes evident, however, that Michelangelo was not destined to remain a continuator