that Condivi is obviously mistaken when he supposes that Michelangelo’s young Bacchus faithfully embodies the Greek spirit.  The Greeks never forgot, in all their representations of Dionysos, that he was a mystic and enthusiastic deity.  Joyous, voluptuous, androgynous, he yet remains the god who brought strange gifts and orgiastic rites to men.  His followers, Silenus, Bacchantes, Fauns, exhibit, in their self-abandonment to sensual joy, the operation of his genius.  The deity descends to join their revels from his clear Olympian ether, but he is not troubled by the fumes of intoxication.  Michelangelo has altered this conception.  Bacchus, with him, is a terrestrial young man, upon the verge of toppling over into drunkenness.  The value of the work is its realism.  The attitude could not be sustained in actual life for a moment without either the goblet spilling its liquor or the body reeling side-ways.  Not only are the eyes wavering and wanton, but the muscles of the mouth have relaxed into a tipsy smile; and, instead of the tiger-skin being suspended from the left arm, it has slipped down, and is only kept from falling by the loose grasp of the trembling hand.  Nothing, again, could be less godlike than the face of Bacchus.  It is the face of a not remarkably good-looking model, and the head is too small both for the body and the heavy crown of leaves.  As a study of incipient intoxication, when the whole person is disturbed by drink, but human dignity has not yet yielded to a bestial impulse, this statue proves the energy of Michelangelo’s imagination.  The physical beauty of his adolescent model in the limbs and body redeems the grossness of the motive by the inalienable charm of health and carnal comeliness.  Finally, the technical merits of the work cannot too strongly be insisted on.  The modelling of the thorax, the exquisite roundness and fleshiness of the thighs and arms and belly, the smooth skin-surface expressed throughout in marble, will excite admiration in all who are capable of appreciating this aspect of the statuary’s art.  Michelangelo produced nothing more finished in execution, if we except the Pieta at S. Peter’s.  His Bacchus alone is sufficient to explode a theory favoured by some critics, that, left to work unhindered, he would still have preferred a certain vagueness, a certain want of polish in his marbles.

Nevertheless, the Bacchus leaves a disagreeable impression on the mind—­as disagreeable in its own way as that produced by the Christ of the Minerva.  That must be because it is wrong in spiritual conception—­brutally materialistic, where it ought to have been noble or graceful.  In my opinion, the frank, joyous naturalism of Sansovino’s Bacchus (also in the Bargello) possesses more of true Greek inspiration than Michelangelo’s.  If Michelangelo meant to carve a Bacchus, he failed; if he meant to imitate a physically desirable young man in a state of drunkenness, he succeeded.

What Shelley wrote upon this statue may here be introduced, since it combines both points of view in a criticism of much spontaneous vigour.