philosophy, expounded by the men who had discovered them, and who were no less proud of their discovery than Columbus of his passage to the Indies, first moulded his mind to those lofty thoughts which it became the task of his life to express in form.  At the same time he heard the preaching of Savonarola.  In the Duomo and the cloister of S. Marco another portion of his soul was touched, and he acquired that deep religious tone which gives its majesty and terror to the Sistine.  Much in the same way was Milton educated by the classics in conjunction with the Scriptures.  Both of these austere natures assimilated from pagan art and Jewish prophecy the twofold elements they needed for their own imaginative life.  Both Michael Angelo and Milton, in spite of their parade of classic style, were separated from the Greek world by a gulf of Hebrew and of Christian feeling.

While Michael Angelo was thus engaged in studying antique sculpture and in listening to Pico and Savonarola, he carved his first bas-relief—­a “Battle of Hercules with the Centaurs,” suggested to him by Poliziano.[291] Meantime Lorenzo died.  His successor Piero set the young man, it is said, to model a snow statue, and then melted like a shape of snow himself down from his pedestal of power in Florence.  Upon the expulsion of the tyrant and the proclamation of the new republic, it was dangerous for house-friends of the Casa Medici to be seen in the city.  Michael Angelo, therefore, made his way to Bologna, where he spent some months in the palace of Gian Francesco Aldovrandini, studying Dante and working at an angel for the shrine of S. Dominic.  As soon, however, as it seemed safe to do so, he returned to Florence; and to this period belongs the statue of the “Sleeping Cupid,” which was sold as an antique to the Cardinal Raffaello Riario.

A dispute about the price of this “Cupid” took Michael Angelo in 1496 to Rome, where it was destined that the greater portion of his life should he spent, and his noblest works of art should be produced.  Here, while the Borgias were turning the Vatican into a den of thieves and harlots, he executed the purest of all his statues—­a “Pieta” in marble.[292] Christ is lying dead upon his mother’s knees.  With her right arm she supports his shoulders; her left hand is gently raised as though to say, “Behold and see!” All that art can do to make death beautiful and grief sublime, is achieved in this masterpiece, which was never surpassed by Michael Angelo in later years.  Already, at the age of four-and-twenty, he had matured his “terrible manner.”  Already were invented in his brain that race of superhuman beings, who became the hieroglyphs of his impassioned utterance.  Madonna has the small head and heroic torso used by this master to symbolise force.  We feel she has no difficulty in holding the dead Christ upon her ample lap and in her powerful arms.  Yet while the “Pieta” is wholly Michael Angelesque, we find no lack of repose, none of those