Michelangelo’s style of design is that of a sculptor, Andrea’s of a colourist, Lionardo’s of a curious student, Raffaello’s of a musician and improvisatore.  These distinctions are not merely fanciful, nor based on what we know about the men in their careers.  We feel similar distinctions in the case of all great draughtsmen.  Titian’s chalk-studies, Fra Bartolommeo’s, so singularly akin to Andrea del Sarto’s, Giorgione’s pen-and-ink sketch for a Lucretia, are seen at once by their richness and blurred outlines to be the work of colourists.  Signorelli’s transcripts from the nude, remarkably similar to those of Michelangelo, reveal a sculptor rather than a painter.  Botticelli, with all his Florentine precision, shows that, like Lionardo, he was a seeker and a visionary in his anxious feeling after curve and attitude.  Mantegna seems to be graving steel or cutting into marble.  It is easy to apply this analysis in succession to any draughtsman who has style.  To do so would, however, be superfluous:  we should only be enforcing what is a truism to all intelligent students of art—­namely, that each individual stamps his own specific quality upon his handiwork; reveals even in the neutral region of design his innate preference for colour or pure form as a channel of expression; betrays the predominance of mental energy or sensuous charm, of scientific curiosity or plastic force, of passion or of tenderness, which controls his nature.  This inevitable and unconscious revelation of the man in art-work strikes us as being singularly modern.  We do not apprehend it to at all the same extent in the sculpture of the ancients, whether it be that our sympathies are too remote from Greek and Roman ways of feeling, or whether the ancients really conceived art more collectively in masses, less individually as persons.

No master exhibits this peculiarly modern quality more decisively than Michelangelo, and nowhere is the personality of his genius, what marks him off and separates him from all fellow-men, displayed with fuller emphasis than in his drawings.  To use the words of a penetrative critic, from whom it is a pleasure to quote:  “The thing about Michelangelo is this; he is not, so to say, at the head of a class, but he stands apart by himself:  he is not possessed of a skill which renders him unapproached or unapproachable; but rather, he is of so unique an order, that no other artist whatever seems to suggest comparison with him.”  Mr. Selwyn Image goes on to define in what a true sense the words “creator” and “creative” may be applied to him:  how the shows and appearances of the world were for him but hieroglyphs of underlying ideas, with which his soul was familiar, and from which he worked again outward; “his learning and skill in the arts supplying to his hand such large and adequate symbols of them as are otherwise beyond attainment.”  This, in a very difficult and impalpable region of aesthetic criticism, is finely said, and accords with Michelangelo’s own utterances