sprites of nature wantoning in Eden in her prime.  They belong to the generation of the fauns.  Like fauns, they combine a certain wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy, a delight in rapid motion as they revel amid clouds and flowers, with the permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the painter’s style.  Correggio’s sensibility to light and colour—­that quality which makes him unique among painters—­was on a par with his feeling for form.  Brightness and darkness are woven together on his figures like an impalpable veil, aerial and transparent, enhancing the palpitations of voluptuous movement which he loved.  His colouring does not glow or burn; blithesome and delicate, it seems exactly such a beauty-bloom as sense requires for its satiety.  That cord of jocund colour which may fitly be combined with the smiles of daylight, the clear blues found in laughing eyes, the pinks that tinge the cheeks of early youth, and the warm yet silvery tones of healthy flesh, mingle, as in a pearl-shell, on his pictures.  Within his own magic circle Correggio reigns supreme; no other artist having blent the witcheries of colouring, chiaroscuro, and wanton loveliness of form, into a harmony so perfect in its sensuous charm.  To feel his influence, and at the same moment to be the subject of strong passion, or intense desire, or heroic resolve, or profound contemplation, or pensive melancholy, is impossible.  The Northern traveller, standing beneath his master-works in Parma, may hear from each of those radiant and laughing faces what the young Italian said to Goethe:  Perche pensa? pensando s’ invecchia.

Michael Angelo is the prophet or seer of the Renaissance.  It would be impossible to imagine a stronger contrast than that which distinguishes his art from Correggio’s, or lives more different in all their details, than those which he and Raphael or Lionardo lived respectively.  During the eighty-nine years of his earthly pilgrimage he saw Italy enslaved and Florence extinguished; it was his exceeding bitter fate to watch the rapid decay of the arts and to witness the triumph of sacerdotal despotism over liberal thought.  To none of these things was he indifferent; and the sorrow they wrought in his soul, found expression in his painting.[264] Michael Angelo was not framed by nature to fascinate like Lionardo or to charm like Raphael.  His manners were severe and simple.  When he spoke, his words were brief and pungent.  When he wrote, whether in poetry or prose, he used the fewest phrases to express the most condensed meaning.  When asked why he had not married, he replied that the wife he had—­his art—­cost him already too much trouble.  He entertained few friends, and shunned society.  Brooding over the sermons of Savonarola, the text of the Bible, the discourses of Plato, and the poems of Dante, he made his spirit strong in solitude by the companionship with everlasting thoughts.  Therefore, when he was called to paint the Sistine Chapel, he uttered through painting the