It does not appear from this that Vasari pretended to have seen the great Cartoon.  Born in 1512, he could not indeed have done so; but there breathes through his description a gust of enthusiasm, an afflatus of concurrent witnesses to its surpassing grandeur.  Some of the details raise a suspicion that Vasari had before his eyes the transcript en grisaille which he says was made by Aristotele da San Gallo, and also the engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi.  The prominence given to the ivy-crowned old soldier troubled by his hose confirms the accuracy of the Holkham picture and the Albertina drawing.  But none of these partial transcripts left to us convey that sense of multitude, space, and varied action which Vasari’s words impress on the imagination.  The fullest, that at Holkham, contains nineteen figures, and these are schematically arranged in three planes, with outlying subjects in foreground and background.  Reduced in scale, and treated with the arid touch of a feeble craftsman, the linear composition suggests no large aesthetic charm.  It is simply a bas-relief of carefully selected attitudes and vigorously studied movements —­nineteen men, more or less unclothed, put together with the scientific view of illustrating possibilities and conquering difficulties in postures of the adult male body.  The extraordinary effect, as of something superhuman, produced by the Cartoon upon contemporaries, and preserved for us in Cellini’s and Vasari’s narratives, must then have been due to unexampled qualities of strength in conception, draughtsmanship, and execution.  It stung to the quick an age of artists who had abandoned the representation of religious sentiment and poetical feeling for technical triumphs and masterly solutions of mechanical problems in the treatment of the nude figure.  We all know how much more than this Michelangelo had in him to give, and how unjust it would be to judge a masterpiece from his hand by the miserable relics now at our disposal.  Still I cannot refrain from thinking that the Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa, taken up by him as a field for the display of his ability, must, by its very brilliancy, have accelerated the ruin of Italian art.  Cellini, we saw, placed it above the frescoes of the Sistine.  In force, veracity, and realism it may possibly have been superior to those sublime productions.  Everything we know about the growth of Michelangelo’s genius leads us to suppose that he departed gradually but surely from the path of Nature.  He came, however, to use what he had learned from Nature as means for the expression of soul-stimulating thoughts.  This, the finest feature of his genius, no artist of the age was capable of adequately comprehending.  Accordingly, they agreed in extolling a cartoon which displayed his faculty of dealing with un bel corpo ignudo as the climax of his powers.