due to the fact that Michelangelo here studied expression and felt the necessity of dramatic characterisation in this part of his work.  He struck each chord of what may be called the poetry of figurative art, from the epic cantos of Creation, Fall, and Deluge, through the tragic odes uttered by prophets and sibyls down to the lyric notes of the genii, and the sweet idyllic strains of the groups in the lunettes and spandrels.

It cannot be said that even here Michelangelo felt the female nude as sympathetically as he felt the male.  The women in the picture of the Deluge are colossal creatures, scarcely distinguishable from the men except by their huge bosoms.  His personal sense of beauty finds fullest expression in the genii.  The variations on one theme of youthful loveliness and grace are inexhaustible; the changes rung on attitude, and face, and feature are endless.  The type, as I have said, has already become schematic.  It is adolescent, but the adolescence is neither that of the Greek athlete nor that of the nude model.  Indeed, it is hardly natural; nor yet is it ideal in the Greek sense of that term.  The physical gracefulness of a slim ephebus was never seized by Michelangelo.  His Ganymede displays a massive trunk and brawny thighs.  Compare this with the Ganymede of Titian.  Compare the Cupid at South Kensington with the Praxitelean Genius of the Vatican—­the Adonis and the Bacchus of the Bargello with Hellenic statues.  The bulk and force of maturity are combined with the smoothness of boyhood and with a delicacy of face that borders on the feminine.

It is an arid region, the region of this mighty master’s spirit.  There are no heavens and no earth or sea in it; no living creatures, forests, flowers; no bright colours, brilliant lights, or cavernous darks.  In clear grey twilight appear a multitude of naked forms, both male and female, yet neither male nor female of the actual world; rather the brood of an inventive intellect, teeming with preoccupations of abiding thoughts and moods of feeling, which become for it incarnate in these stupendous figures.  It is as though Michelangelo worked from the image in his brain outwards to a physical presentment supplied by his vast knowledge of life, creating forms proper to his own specific concept.

Nowhere else in plastic art does the mental world peculiar to the master press in so immediately, without modification and without mitigation, upon our sentient imagination.  I sometimes dream that the inhabitants of the moon may be like Michelangelo’s men and women, as I feel sure its landscape resembles his conception of the material universe.