[287] There are probably not few of my readers who, after seeing this painting in the Ducal Palace, will agree with me that it is, if not the greatest, at any rate the most beautiful, oil picture in existence.  In no other picture has a poem of feeling and of fancy, a romance of varied lights and shades, a symphony of delicately blended hues, a play of attitude and movement transitory but in no sense forced or violent, been more successfully expressed by means more simple or with effect more satisfying.  Something of the mythopoeic faculty must have survived in Tintoretto, and enabled him to inspire the Greek tale with this intense vitality of beauty.

[288] The first of these pictures is in the Ducal Palace, the other two in the Academy at Venice.

CHAPTER VIII

LIFE OF MICHAEL ANGELO

Contrast of Michael Angelo and Cellini—­Parentage and Boyhood of Michael Angelo—­Work with Ghirlandajo—­Gardens of S. Marco—­The Medicean Circle—­Early Essays in Sculpture—­Visit to Bologna—­First Visit to Rome—­The “Pieta” of S. Peter’s—­Michael Angelo as a Patriot and a Friend of the Medici—­Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa—­Michael Angelo and Julius II.—­The Tragedy of the Tomb—­Design for the Pope’s Mausoleum—­Visit to Carrara—­Flight from Rome—­Michael Angelo at Bologna—­Bronze Statue of Julius—­Return to Rome—­Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—­Greek and Modern Art—­Raphael—­Michael Angelo and Leo X.—­S.  Lorenzo—­The new Sacristy—­Circumstances under which it was designed and partly finished—­Meaning of the Allegories—­Incomplete state of Michael Angelo’s Marbles—­Paul III.—­The “Last Judgment”—­Critiques of Contemporaries—­The Dome of S. Peter’s—­Vittoria Colonna—­Tommaso Cavalieri—­Personal Habits of Michael Angelo—­His Emotional Nature—­Last Illness.

The life of Italian artists at the time of the Renaissance may be illustrated by two biographies.  Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Benvenuto Cellini were almost opposite in all they thought and felt, experienced and aimed at.  The one impressed his own strong personality on art; the other reflected the light and shadow of the age in the record of his manifold existence.  Cellini hovered, like some strong-winged creature, on the surface of human activity, yielding himself to every impulse, seeking every pleasure, and of beauty feeling only the rude animal compulsion.  Deep philosophic thoughts, ideas of death and judgment, the stern struggles of the soul, encompassed Michael Angelo; the service of beauty was with him religion.  Cellini was the creature of the moment—­the glass and mirror of corrupt, enslaved, yet still resplendent Italy.  In Michael Angelo the genius of the Renaissance culminated; but his character was rather that of an austere Republican, free and solitary amid the multitudes of slaves and courtiers.  Michael Angelo made art the vehicle of lofty and soul-shaking thought.  Cellini brought the fervour of an inexhaustibly active nature to the service of sensuality, and taught his art to be the handmaid of a soulless paganism.  In these two men, therefore, we study two aspects of their age.  How far both were exceptional, need not here be questioned; since their singularity consists not so much in being different from other Italians of the sixteenth century as in concentrating qualities elsewhere scattered and imperfect.