n, shows a group of three
executioners hurling men with millstones round their necks into a
raging river from the bridge which spans it. The first victim
flounders half merged in the flood; a second plunges head foremost
through the air; the third stands bent upon the parapet, his shoulders
pressed down by the varlets on each side, at the very point of being
flung to death by drowning. In another of these pictures a man seated
upon the ground is being tortured by the breaking of his teeth, while
a furious fellow holds a club suspended over him, in act to shatter
his thigh-bones. Naked soldiers wrestle in mad conflict, whirl staves
above their heads, fling stones, displaying their coarse muscles with
a kind of frenzy. Even the classical subjects suffer from extreme
dramatic energy of treatment. Ceres, seeking her daughter through the
plains of Sicily, dashes frantically on a car of dragons, her hair
dishevelled to the winds, her cheeks gashed by her own crooked
fingers. Eurydice struggles in the clutch of bestial devils; Pluto,
like a mediaeval Satan, frowns above the scene of fiendish riot; the
violin of Orpheus thrills faintly through the infernal tumult. Gazing
on the spasms and convulsions of these grim subjects, we are inclined
to credit a legend preserved at Orvieto to the effect that the painter
depicted his own unfaithful mistress in the naked woman who is being
borne on a demon's back through the air to hell.

No one who has studied Michelangelo impartially will deny that in this
preference for the violent he came near to Signorelli. We feel it in
his choice of attitude, the strain he puts upon the lines of plastic
composition, the stormy energy of his conception and expression. It is
what we call his _terribilita_. But here again that dominating sense
of harmony, that instinct for the necessity of subordinating each
artistic element to one strain of architectonic music, which I have
already indicated as the leading note of difference between him and
the painter of Cortona, intervened to elevate his terribleness into
the region of sublimity. The violence of Michelangelo, unlike that of
Luca, lay not so much in the choice of savage subjects (cruelty,
ferocity, extreme physical and mental torment) as in a forceful,
passionate, tempestuous way of handling all the themes he treated. The
angels of the Judgment, sustaining the symbols of Christ's Passion,
wrestle and bend their agitated limbs like athletes. Christ eme