learned, and used with overwhelming mastery, was man:  physical mankind, converted into spiritual vehicle by art.  His grasp upon this region failed him now.  Perhaps there was not the old sympathy with lovely shapes.  Perhaps he knew that he had played on every gamut of that lyre.  Emerging from the sphere of the sensuous, where ideas take plastic embodiment, he grappled in this final stage of his career with harmonical ratios and direct verbal expression, where ideas are disengaged from figurative form.  The men and women, loved by him so long, so wonderfully wrought into imperishable shapes, “nurslings of immortality,” recede.  In their room arise, above the horizon of his intellect, the cupola of S. Peter’s and a few imperishable poems, which will live as long as Italian claims a place among the languages.  There is no comparison to be instituted between his actual achievements as a builder and a versifier.  The whole tenor of his life made him more competent to deal with architecture than with literature.  Nevertheless, it is significant that the versatile genius of the man was henceforth restricted to these two channels of expression, and that in both of them his last twenty years of existence produced bloom and fruit of unexpected rarity.

After writing this paragraph, and before I engage in the narrative of what is certainly the final manifestation of Michelangelo’s genius as a creative artist, I ought perhaps to pause, and to give some account of those survivals from his plastic impulse, which occupied the old man’s energies for several years.  They were entirely the outcome of religious feeling; and it is curious to notice that he never approached so nearly to true Christian sentiment as in the fragmentary designs which we may still abundantly collect from this late autumn of his artist’s life.  There are countless drawings for some great picture of the Crucifixion, which was never finished:  exquisite in delicacy of touch, sublime in conception, dignified in breadth and grand repose of style.  Condivi tells us that some of these were made for the Marchioness of Pescara.  But Michelangelo must have gone on producing them long after her death.  With these phantoms of stupendous works to be, the Museums of Europe abound.  We cannot bring them together, or condense them into a single centralised conception.  Their interest consists in their divergence and variety, showing the continuous poring of the master’s mind upon a theme he could not definitely grasp.  For those who love his work, and are in sympathy with his manner, these drawings, mostly in chalk, and very finely handled, have a supreme interest.  They show him, in one sense, at his highest and his best, not only as a man of tender feeling, but also as a mighty draughtsman.  Their incompleteness testifies to something pathetic—­the humility of the imperious man before a theme he found to be beyond the reach of human faculty.