ok Michael Angelo in 1496 to
Rome, where it was destined that the greater portion of his life should he
spent, and his noblest works of art should be produced. Here, while the
Borgias were turning the Vatican into a den of thieves and harlots, he
executed the purest of all his statues--a "Pieta" in marble.[292] Christ
is lying dead upon his mother's knees. With her right arm she supports his
shoulders; her left hand is gently raised as though to say, "Behold and
see!" All that art can do to make death beautiful and grief sublime, is
achieved in this masterpiece, which was never surpassed by Michael Angelo
in later years. Already, at the age of four-and-twenty, he had matured his
"terrible manner." Already were invented in his brain that race of
superhuman beings, who became the hieroglyphs of his impassioned
utterance. Madonna has the small head and heroic torso used by this master
to symbolise force. We feel she has no difficulty in holding the dead
Christ upon her ample lap and in her powerful arms. Yet while the "Pieta"
is wholly Michael Angelesque, we find no lack of repose, none of those
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 Michae