But the statue remains stone; this unmeaning emphasis of weight and bulk, though diminished, is not to be got rid of.  The life that sculpture can give is superficial and abstract, does not penetrate and possess the work; it is still the petrifaction of an instant, that does not instantly pass away, but remains as a contradiction to the next.  It is the struggle against this fixity that gives to the sculpture of the Renaissance its aspect of unrest, of disdain of the present, of endless unsatisfied search.  Hence the air of conflict that we see in Giovanni Pisano, and still more in later times,—­the sculptor going to the edge of what the stone will allow, and beyond it, and, still unsatisfied, seeking through all means to indicate a yet unexecuted possibility.  It is this that seethes in those strange, intense, unearthly figures of Donatello’s, wasted as by internal fire,—­the rage for an expression that shall at the same time declare its own insufficiency.

All that is done only makes the failure more evident.  The fixity continues, and is only deepened into contortion and grimace.  What we see is the effort alone.  Hence in modern statues the uneasy, self-distrustful appeal to the spectator, in place of the lofty indifference of the antique.  In Michel Angelo the same striving to indicate something in reserve, not expended, led to the exaggerated emphasis of certain parts, (as the length of the neck, depth of the eye-sockets, etc.,) and of general muscularity,—­a show of force, that gave to the Moses the build of a Titan, and to the Christ of the Last Judgment the air of a gladiator.  Michel Angelo often seems immersed in mere anatomy and academic tours de force, especially in his later works.  He seems to see in the subject only a fresh problem in attitude, foreshortening, muscular display,—­and this not only where he invents, but also where he borrows,—­sometimes most strangely overlooking the sentiment; as in the figure of Christ, which he borrows from Orcagna and the older painters, even to the position of the arms, but with the touching gesture of reproof perverted into a savage menace; or in the Expulsion, taken almost line for line from Masaccio, but with the infinite grief expressed in Adam’s figure turned into melodrama by showing his face.

It was not for the delight of the eye, nor from over-reverence of the matter-of-fact.  He despised the copying of models, as the makeshift of ignorance.  His profound study of anatomy was not for greater accuracy of imitation, but for greater license of invention.  Of grace and pleasingness he became more and more careless, until he who at twenty had carved the lovely angel of S. Domenico, came at last to make all his men prize-fighters and his women viragos.  It is clear that we nowhere get his final meaning,—­that he does not fairly get to his theme at all, but is stopped at the outset, and loses himself in the search for a mode of expression more adequate to that “immense