ld be wrong to ascribe too much to the immediate influence of
the elder over the younger artist--at any rate in so far as the
frescoes of the Chapel of S. Brizio may have determined the creation
of the Sistine. Yet Vasari left on record that "even Michelangelo
followed the manner of Signorelli, as any one may see." Undoubtedly,
Buonarroti, while an inmate of Lorenzo de' Medici's palace at
Florence, felt the power of Luca's Madonna with the naked figures in
the background; the leading motive of which he transcended in his Doni
Holy Family. Probably at an early period he had before his eyes the
bold nudities, uncompromising designs, and awkward composition of
Luca's so-called School of Pan. In like manner, we may be sure that
during his first visit to Rome he was attracted by Signorelli's solemn
fresco of Moses in the Sistine. These things were sufficient to
establish a link of connection between the painter of Cortona and the
Florentine sculptor. And when Michelangelo visited the Chapel of S.
Brizio, after he had fixed and formed his style (exhibiting his innate
force of genius in the Pieta, the Bacchus, the Cupid, the David, the
statue of Julius, the Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa), that early bond
of sympathy must have been renewed and enforced. They were men of a
like temperament, and governed by kindred aesthetic instincts.
Michelangelo brought to its perfection that system of working wholly
through the human form which Signorelli initiated. He shared his
violence, his _terribilita_, his almost brutal candour. In the fated
evolution of Italian art, describing its parabola of vital energy,
Michelangelo softened, sublimed, and harmonised his predecessor's
qualities. He did this by abandoning Luca's naivetes and crudities;
exchanging his savage transcripts from coarse life for profoundly
studied idealisations of form; subordinating his rough and casual
design to schemes of balanced composition, based on architectural
relations; penetrating the whole accomplished work, as he intended it
should be, with a solemn and severe strain of unifying intellectual
melody.

Viewed in this light, the vault of the Sistine and the later fresco of
the Last Judgment may be taken as the final outcome of all previous
Italian art upon a single line of creative energy, and that line the
one anticipated by Luca Signorelli. In like manner, the Stanze and
Loggie of the Vatican were the final outcome of the same process upon
another line, sugge