f his life.
It has been developed in a somewhat exaggerated form, of late years,
by several psychologists of the new school (Parlagreco and Lombroso in
Italy, Nisbet in England), who attempt to prove that Michelangelo was
the subject of neurotic disorder. The most important and serious essay
in this direction is a little book of great interest and almost
hypercritical acumen published recently at Naples. Signor Parlagreco
lays great stress upon Michelangelo's insensibility to women, his
"strange and contradictory feeling about feminine beauty." He seeks to
show, what is indeed, I think, capable of demonstration, that the
man's intense devotion to art and study, his solitary habits and
constitutional melancholy, caused him to absorb the ordinary instincts
and passions of a young man into his aesthetic temperament; and that
when, in later life, he began to devote his attention to poetry, he
treated love from the point of view of mystical philosophy. In support
of this argument Parlagreco naturally insists upon the famous
friendship with Vittoria Colonna, and quotes the Platonising poems
commonly attributed to this emotion. He has omitted to mention, what
certainly bears upon the point of Michelangelo's frigidity, that only
one out of the five Buonarroti brothers, sons of Lodovico, married.
Nor does he take into account the fact that Raffaello da Urbino, who
was no less devoted and industrious in art and study, retained the
liveliest sensibility to female charms. In other words, the critic
appears to neglect that common-sense solution of the problem, which is
found in a cold and physically sterile constitution as opposed to one
of greater warmth and sensuous activity.

Parlagreco attributes much value to what he calls the religious
terrors and remorse of Michelangelo's old age; says that "his fancy
became haunted with doubts and fears; every day discovering fresh sins
in the past, inveighing against the very art which made him famous
among men, and seeking to propitiate Paradise for his soul by acts of
charity to dowerless maidens." The sonnets to Vasari and some others
are quoted in support of this view. But the question remains, whether
it is not exaggerated to regard pious aspirations, and a sense of
human life's inadequacy at its close, as the signs of nervous malady.
The following passage sums up Parlagreco's theory in a succession of
pregnant sentences. "An accurate study, based upon his correspondence
in connection