Standing before these statues, we do not cry.  How beautiful!  We murmur, How terrible, how grand!  Yet, after long gazing, we find them gifted with beauty beyond grace.  In each of them there is a palpitating thought, torn from the artist’s soul and crystallised in marble.  It has been said that architecture is petrified music.  In the sacristy of S. Lorenzo we feel impelled to remember phrases of Beethoven.  Each of these statues becomes for us a passion, fit for musical expression, but turned like Niobe to stone.  They have the intellectual vagueness, the emotional certainty, that belong to the motives of a symphony.  In their allegories, left without a key, sculpture has passed beyond her old domain of placid concrete form.  The anguish of intolerable emotion, the quickening of the consciousness to a sense of suffering, the acceptance of the inevitable, the strife of the soul with destiny, the burden and the passion of mankind:—­that is what they contain in their cold chisel-tortured marble.  It is open to critics of the school of Lessing to object that here is the suicide of sculpture.  It is easy to remark that those strained postures and writhen limbs may have perverted the taste of lesser craftsmen.  Yet if Michael Angelo was called to carve Medicean statues after the sack of Rome and the fall of Florence—­if he was obliged in sober sadness to make sculpture a fit language for his sorrow-laden heart—­how could he have wrought more truthfully than thus?  To imitate him without sharing his emotions or comprehending his thoughts, as the soulless artist of the decadence attempted, was without any doubt a grievous error.  Surely also we may regret, not without reason, that in the evil days upon which he had fallen, the fair antique “Heiterkeit” and “Allgemeinheit” were beyond his reach.

Michael Angelo left the tombs of the Medici unfinished; nor, in spite of Duke Cosimo’s earnest entreaties, would he afterwards return to Florence to complete them.  Lorenzo’s features are but rough-hewn; so is the face of Night.  Day seems struggling into shape beneath his mask of rock, and Twilight shows everywhere the tooth-dint of the chisel.  To leave unfinished was the fate of Michael Angelo—­partly too, perhaps, his preference; for he was easily deterred from work.  Many of his marbles are only just begun.  The two medallion “Madonnas,” the “Madonna and Child” in S. Lorenzo, the “Head of Brutus,” the “Bound Captives,” and the “Pieta” in the Duomo of Florence, are instances of masterpieces in the rough.  He loved to fancy that the form dwelt within the stone, and that the chisel disencumbered it of superfluity.  Therefore, to his eye, foreseeing what the shape would be when the rude envelope was chipped away, the marble mask may have taken the appearance of a veil or mantle.  He may have found some fascination in the incompleteness that argued want of will but not of art, and a rough-hewn Madonna may have been to him what a Dryad still enclosed within a gnarled