e world we live in. Signorelli invented an intricate
design for arabesque pilasters, one on each side of the door leading
from his chapel into the Cathedral. They are painted _en grisaille_,
and are composed exclusively of nudes, mostly male, perched or grouped
in a marvellous variety of attitudes upon an ascending series of
slender-stemmed vases, which build up gigantic candelabra by their
aggregation. The naked form is treated with audacious freedom. It
appears to be elastic in the hands of the modeller. Some dead bodies
carried on the backs of brawny porters are even awful by the contrast
of their wet-clay limpness with the muscular energy of brutal life
beneath them. Satyrs giving drink to one another, fauns whispering in
the ears of stalwart women, centaurs trotting with corpses flung
across their cruppers, combatants trampling in frenzy upon prostrate
enemies, men sunk in self-abandonment to sloth or sorrow--such are the
details of these incomparable columns, where our sense of the
grotesque and vehement is immediately corrected by a perception of
rare energy in the artist who could play thus with his plastic
puppets.

We have here certainly the preludings to Michelangelo's serener, more
monumental work in the Sistine Chapel. The leading motive is the same
in both great masterpieces. It consists in the use of the simple body,
if possible the nude body, for the expression of thought and emotion,
the telling of a tale, the delectation of the eye by ornamental
details. It consists also in the subordination of the female to the
male nude as the symbolic unit of artistic utterance. Buonarroti is
greater than Signorelli chiefly through that larger and truer
perception of aesthetic unity which seems to be the final outcome of a
long series of artistic effort. The arabesques, for instance, with
which Luca wreathed his portraits of the poets, are monstrous,
bizarre, in doubtful taste. Michelangelo, with a finer instinct for
harmony, a deeper grasp on his own dominant ideal, excluded this
element of _quattrocento_ decoration from his scheme. Raffaello, with
the graceful tact essential to the style, developed its crude
rudiments into the choice forms of fanciful delightfulness which charm
us in the Loggie. Signorelli loved violence. A large proportion of the
circular pictures painted _en grisaille_ on these walls represent
scenes of massacre, assassination, torture, ruthless outrage. One of
them, extremely spirited in desig