of a dead tradition, was feeling for the beauty of classical work in a good age, and through that feeling a more perfect sympathy with nature.  It is just at this point that the old tale about the sarcophagus of the Countess Beatrice conveys not only the letter but the spirit of the fact.  Niccola’s genius, no less vivid and life-giving than that of Giotto, infused into the hard and formal manner of his immediate predecessors true nature and true art.  Between the bas-relief of S. Salvatore and the bas-relief over the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, there is indeed a broad gulf, yet such as might have been passed at one bound by a master into whose soul the beauty of a fragment of Greek art had sunk, and who had received at his birth the gift of a creative genius.

FOOTNOTES: 

[408] History of Painting in Italy, vol. i. chap. iv.

[409] Loc. cit. p. 127, note.

[410] Loc. cit. p. 127.

[411] Mr. Perkins, following the suggestion of Panza, in his Istoria dell’ Antica Republica d’Amalfi, is inclined to think that this head represents, not Sigelgaita, but Joanna II. of Naples, and is therefore more than a century later in date than the pulpit.  See Italian Sculptors, p. 51.

APPENDIX II

Michael Angelo’s Sonnets

After the death of Michael Angelo, the manuscripts of his sonnets, madrigals, and other poems, written at various periods of his life, and well known to his intimate friends, passed into the hands of his nephew, Lionardo Buonarroti.  From Lionardo they descended to his son, Michael Angelo, who was himself a poet of some mark.  This grand-nephew of the sculptor prepared them for the press, and gave them to the world in 1623.  On his redaction the commonly received version of the poems rested until 1863, when Signor Cesare Guasti of Florence, having gained access to the original manuscripts, published a critical edition, preserving every peculiarity of the autograph, and adding a prose paraphrase for the explanation of the text.

The younger Michael Angelo, working in an age of literary pedantry and moral prudery, fancied that it was his duty to refine the style of his great ancestor, and to remove allusions open to ignorant misconstruction.  Instead, therefore, of giving an exact transcript of the original poems, he set himself to soften down their harshness, to clear away their obscurity, to amplify, transpose, and mutilate according to his own ideas of syntax, taste, and rhetoric.  On the Dantesque ruggedness of Michael Angelo he engrafted the prettiness of the seventeenth Petrarchisti; and where he thought the morality of the poems was questionable, especially in the case of those addressed to Cavalieri, he did not hesitate to introduce such alterations as destroyed their obvious intention.  In order to understand the effect of this method, it is only necessary to compare the autograph as printed by Guasti with the version of 1623.  In Sonnet xxxi., for example, the two copies agree in only one line, while the remaining thirteen are distorted and adorned with superfluous conceits by the over-scrupulous but not too conscientious editor of 1623.[412]