et 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 super