Michael Angelo formed no school in the strict sense of the word.  Yet his influence was not the less felt on that account, nor less powerful than Raphael’s in the same direction.  During his manhood the painters Sebastian del Piombo, Marcello Venusti, and Daniele da Volterra, had endeavoured to add the charm of oil-colouring to his designs; and long before his death, the seduction of his mighty mannerism had begun to exercise a fatal charm for all the schools of Italy.  Painters incapable of fathoming his intention, unsympathetic to his rare type of intellect, and gifted with less than a tithe of his native force, set themselves to reproduce whatever may be justly censured in his works.  To heighten and enlarge their style was reckoned a chief duty of aspiring craftsmen; and it was thought that recipes for attaining to this final perfection of the modern arts might be extracted without trouble from Michael Angelo’s masterpieces.  Unluckily, in proportion as his fame increased, his peculiarities grew with the advance of age more manneristic and defined; so that his imitators fixed precisely upon that which sober critics now regard as a deduction from his greatness.  They failed to perceive that he owed his grandeur to his personality; and that the audacities which fascinated them, became mere whimsical extravagances when severed from his terribilita and sombre simplicity of impassioned thought.  His power and his spirit were alike unique and uncommunicable, while the admiration of his youthful worshippers betrayed them into imitating the externals of a style that was rapidly losing spontaneity and sense of beauty.  Therefore they fancied they were treading in his footsteps and using the grand manner when they covered church-roofs and canvases with sprawling figures in distorted attitudes.  Instead of studying nature, they studied Michael Angelo’s cartoons, exaggerating by their unintelligent discipleship his wilfulness and arbitrary choice of form.

Vasari’s and Cellini’s criticisms of a master they both honestly revered, may suffice to illustrate the false method adopted by these mimics of Michael Angelo’s ideal.  To charge him with faults proceeding from the weakness and blindness of the decadence—­the faults of men too blind to read his art aright, too weak to stand on their own feet without him—­would be either stupid or malicious.  If at the close of the sixteenth century the mannerists sought to startle and entrance the world by empty exhibitions of muscular anatomy misunderstood, and by a braggadocio display of meaningless effects—­crowding their compositions with studies from the nude, and painting agitated groups without a discernible cause for agitation—­the crime surely lay with the patrons who liked such decoration, and with the journeymen who provided it.  Michael Angelo himself always made his manner serve his thought.  We may fail to appreciate his manner and may be incapable of comprehending his thought; but only insincere or