upon her right arm, and presenting him to a bald-headed old man, S. Joseph, who seems about to take him in his arms.  This group, which forms a tall pyramid, is balanced on both sides by naked figures of young men reclining against a wall at some distance, while a remarkably ugly little S. John can be discerned in one corner.  There is something very powerful and original in the composition of this sacred picture, which, as in the case of all Michelangelo’s early work, develops the previous traditions of Tuscan art on lines which no one but himself could have discovered.  The central figure of the Madonna, too, has always seemed to me a thing of marvellous beauty, and of stupendous power in the strained attitude and nobly modelled arms.  It has often been asked what the male nudes have got to do with the subject.  Probably Michelangelo intended in this episode to surpass a Madonna by Luca Signorelli, with whose genius he obviously was in sympathy, and who felt, like him, the supreme beauty of the naked adolescent form.  Signorelli had painted a circular Madonna with two nudes in the landscape distance for Lorenzo de’ Medici.  The picture is hung now in the gallery of the Uffizi.  It is enough perhaps to remark that Michelangelo needed these figures for his scheme, and for filling the space at his disposal.  He was either unable or unwilling to compose a background of trees, meadows, and pastoral folk in the manner of his predecessors.  Nothing but the infinite variety of human forms upon a barren stage of stone or arid earth would suit his haughty sense of beauty.  The nine persons who make up the picture are all carefully studied from the life, and bear a strong Tuscan stamp.  S. John is literally ignoble, and Christ is a commonplace child.  The Virgin Mother is a magnificent contadina in the plenitude of adult womanhood.  Those, however, who follow Mr. Ruskin in blaming Michelangelo for carelessness about the human face and head, should not fail to notice what sublime dignity and grace he has communicated to his model here.  In technical execution the Doni Madonna is faithful to old Florentine usage, but lifeless and unsympathetic.  We are disagreeably reminded by every portion of the surface that Lionardo’s subtle play of tones and modulated shades, those sfumature, as Italians call them, which transfer the mystic charm of nature to the canvas, were as yet unknown to the great draughtsman.  There is more of atmosphere, of colour suggestion, and of chiaroscuro in the marble tondi described above.  Moreover, in spite of very careful modelling, Michelangelo has failed to make us feel the successive planes of his composition.  The whole seems flat, and each distance, instead of being graduated, starts forward to the eye.  He required, at this period of his career, the relief of sculpture in order to express the roundness of the human form and the relative depth of objects placed in a receding order.  If anything were needed to make us believe the story