rges
from the sepulchre, not in victorious tranquillity, but with the clash
and clangour of an irresistible energy set free. Even in the
Crucifixion, one leg has been wrenched away from the nail which
pierced its foot, and writhes round the knee of the other still left
riven to the cross. The loves of Leda and the Swan, of Ixion and Juno,
are spasms of voluptuous pain; the sleep of the Night is troubled with
fantastic dreams, and the Dawn starts into consciousness with a
shudder of prophetic anguish. There is not a hand, a torso, a simple
nude, sketched by this extraordinary master, which does not vibrate
with nervous tension, as though the fingers that grasped the pen were
clenched and the eyes that viewed the model glowed beneath knit brows.
Michelangelo, in fact, saw nothing, felt nothing, interpreted nothing,
on exactly the same lines as any one who had preceded or who followed
him. His imperious personality he stamped upon the smallest trifle of
his work.

Luca's frescoes at Orvieto, when compared with Michelangelo's in the
Sistine, mark the transition from the art of the fourteenth, through
the art of the fifteenth, to that of the sixteenth century, with broad
and trenchant force. They are what Marlowe's dramas were to
Shakespeare's. They retain much of the mediaeval tradition both as
regards form and sentiment. We feel this distinctly in the treatment
of Dante, whose genius seems to have exerted at least as strong an
influence over Signorelli's imagination as over that of Michelangelo.
The episodes from the Divine Comedy are painted in a rude Gothic
spirit. The spirits of Hell seem borrowed from grotesque bas-reliefs
of the Pisan school. The draped, winged, and armed angels of Heaven
are posed with a ceremonious research of suavity or grandeur. These
and other features of his work carry us back to the period of Giotto
and Niccolo Pisano. But the true force of the man, what made him a
commanding master of the middle period, what distinguished him from
all his fellows of the _quattrocento_, is the passionate delight he
took in pure humanity--the nude, the body studied under all its
aspects and with no repugnance for its coarseness--man in his crudity
made the sole sufficient object for figurative art, anatomy regarded
as the crowning and supreme end of scientific exploration. It is this
in his work which carries us on toward the next age, and justifies our
calling Luca "the morning-star of Michelangelo."

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