contorted lines that are commonly urged against his manner.  It is a sober and harmonious composition, combining the profoundest religious feeling with classical tranquillity of expression.  Again, though the group is forcibly original, this effect of originality is produced, as in all the best work of the golden age, not by new and startling conception, but by the handling of an old and well-worn motive with the grandeur of consummate style.  What the genius of Italian sculpture had for generations been striving after, finds its perfect realisation here.  It was precisely by thus crowning the endeavours of antecedent artists—­by bringing the opening buds of painting and sculpture to full blossom, and exhausting the resources of a long sustained and common inspiration, that the great masters proved their supremacy and rendered an advance beyond their vantage ground impossible.  To those who saw and comprehended this “Pieta” in 1500, it must have been evident that a new power of portraying the very soul had been manifested in sculpture—­a power unknown to the Greeks because it lay outside the sphere of their spiritual experience, and unknown to modern artists because it was beyond their faculties of execution and conception.  Yet who in Rome, among the courtiers of the Borgias, had brain or heart to understand these things?

In 1501 Michael Angelo returned to Florence, where he stayed until the year 1505.  This period was fruitful of results on which his after fame depended.  The great statue of “David,” the two unfinished medallions of Madonna in relief, the “Holy Family of the Tribune” painted for Angelo Doni, and the Cartoon of the “Battle of Pisa” were now produced; and no man’s name, not even Lionardo’s, stood higher in esteem thenceforward.  It will be remembered that Savonarola was now dead, but that his constitution still existed under the presidency of Pietro Soderini—­the non mai abbastanza lodato Cavaliere, as Pitti calls him, the anima sciocca of Machiavelli’s epigram.[293] Since Michael Angelo at this time was employed in the service of masters who had superseded his old friends and patrons, it may be well to review here his attitude in general toward the house of Medici.  Throughout his lifetime there continued a conflict between the artist and the citizen—­the artist owing education and employment to successive members of that house, the citizen resenting their despotism and doing all that in him lay at times to keep them out of Florence.  As a patriot, as the student of Dante and the disciple of Savonarola, Michael Angelo detested tyrants.[294] One of his earliest madrigals, conceived as a dialogue between Florence and her exiles, expresses his mind so decidedly that I have ventured to translate it;[295] the exiles first address Florence, and she answers:—­

    “Lady, for joy of lovers numberless
      Thou wast created fair as angels are. 
      Sure God hath fallen asleep in heaven afar,
      When one man calls the boon of many his. 
      Give back to streaming eyes
      The daylight of Thy face, that seems to shun
      Those who must live defrauded of their bliss!”