The whole series of designs for Christ’s Crucifixion and Deposition from the Cross are executed in chalk, sometimes black, but mostly red.  It is manifest, upon examination, that they are not studies from the model, but thoughts evoked and shadowed forth on paper.  Their perplexing multiplicity and subtle variety—­as though a mighty improvisatore were preluding again and yet again upon the clavichord to find his theme, abandoning the search, renewing it, altering the key, changing the accent—­prove that this continued seeking with the crayon after form and composition was carried on in solitude and abstract moments.  Incomplete as the designs may be, they reveal Michelangelo’s loftiest dreams and purest visions.  The nervous energy, the passionate grip upon the subject, shown in the pen-drawings, are absent here.  These qualities are replaced by meditation and an air of rapt devotion.  The drawings for the Passion might be called the prayers and pious thoughts of the stern master.

Red chalk he used for some of his most brilliant conceptions.  It is not necessary to dwell upon the bending woman’s head at Oxford, or the torso of the lance-bearer at Vienna.  Let us confine our attention to what is perhaps the most pleasing and most perfect of all Michelangelo’s designs—­the “Bersaglio,” or the “Arcieri,” in the Queen’s collection at Windsor.

It is a group of eleven naked men and one woman, fiercely footing the air, and driving shafts with all their might to pierce a classical terminal figure, whose face, like that of Pallas, and broad breast are guarded by a spreading shield.  The draughtsman has indicated only one bow, bent with fury by an old man in the background.  Yet all the actions proper to archery are suggested by the violent gestures and strained sinews of the crowd.  At the foot of the terminal statue, Cupid lies asleep upon his wings, with idle bow and quiver.  Two little genii of love, in the background, are lighting up a fire, puffing its flames, as though to drive the archers onward.  Energy and ardour, impetuous movement and passionate desire, could not be expressed with greater force, nor the tyranny of some blind impulse be more imaginatively felt.  The allegory seems to imply that happiness is not to be attained, as human beings mostly strive to seize it, by the fierce force of the carnal passions.  It is the contrast between celestial love asleep in lustful souls, and vulgar love inflaming tyrannous appetites:—­

  The one love soars, the other downward tends;
    The soul lights this, while that the senses stir,
    And still lust’s arrow at base quarry flies.