As might be expected, there was no landscape in the Cartoon.  Michelangelo handled his subject wholly from the point of view of sculpture.  A broken bank and a retreating platform, a few rocks in the distance and a few waved lines in the foreground, showed that the naked men were by a river.  Michelangelo’s unrelenting contempt for the many-formed and many-coloured stage on which we live and move—­his steady determination to treat men and women as nudities posed in the void, with just enough of solid substance beneath their feet to make their attitudes intelligible—­is a point which must over and over again be insisted on.  In the psychology of the master, regarded from any side one likes to take, this constitutes his leading characteristic.  It gives the key, not only to his talent as an artist, but also to his temperament as a man.

Marcantonio seems to have felt and resented the aridity of composition, the isolation of plastic form, the tyranny of anatomical science, which even the most sympathetic of us feel in Michelangelo.  This master’s engraving of three lovely nudes, the most charming memento preserved to us from the Cartoon, introduces a landscape of grove and farm, field and distant hill, lending suavity to the muscular male body and restoring it to its proper place among the sinuous lines and broken curves of Nature.  That the landscape was adapted from a copper-plate of Lucas van Leyden signifies nothing.  It serves the soothing purpose which sensitive nerves, irritated by Michelangelo’s aloofness from all else but thought and naked flesh and posture, gratefully acknowledge.

While Michelangelo was finishing his Cartoon, Lionardo da Vinci was painting his fresco.  Circumstances may have brought the two chiefs of Italian art frequently together in the streets of Florence.  There exists an anecdote of one encounter, which, though it rests upon the credit of an anonymous writer, and does not reflect a pleasing light upon the hero of this biography, cannot be neglected.  “Lionardo,” writes our authority, “was a man of fair presence, well-proportioned, gracefully endowed, and of fine aspect.  He wore a tunic of rose-colour, falling to his knees; for at that time it was the fashion to carry garments of some length; and down to the middle of his breast there flowed a beard beautifully curled and well arranged.  Walking with a friend near S. Trinita, where a company of honest folk were gathered, and talk was going on about some passage from Dante, they called to Lionardo, and begged him to explain its meaning.  It so happened that just at this moment Michelangelo went by, and, being hailed by one of them, Lionardo answered:  ’There goes Michelangelo; he will interpret the verses you require.’  Whereupon Michelangelo, who thought he spoke in this way to make fun of him, replied in anger:  ’Explain them yourself, you who made the model of a horse to cast in bronze, and could not cast it, and to your shame left it in the lurch.’  With these words, he turned his back to the group, and went his way.  Lionardo remained standing there, red in the face for the reproach cast at him; and Michelangelo, not satisfied, but wanting to sting him to the quick, added:  ’And those Milanese capons believed in your ability to do it!’”