Romantic as opposed to a Classic artist. That is to say, he sought
invariably for character--character in type, character in attitude,
character in every action of each muscle, character in each
extravagance of pose. He applied the Romantic principle to the body
and the limbs, exactly to that region of the human form which the
Greeks had conquered as their province. He did so with consummate
science and complete mastery of physiological law. What is more, he
compelled the body to become expressive, not, as the Greeks had done,
of broad general conceptions, but of the most intimate and poignant
personal emotions. This was his main originality. At the same time,
being a Romantic, he deliberately renounced the main tradition of that
manner. He refused to study portraiture, as Vasari tells us, and as we
see so plainly in the statues of the Dukes at Florence. He generalised
his faces, composing an ideal cast of features out of several types.
In the rendering of the face and head, then, he chose to be a Classic,
while in the treatment of the body he was vehemently modern. In all
his work which is not meant to be dramatic--that is, excluding the
damned souls in the Last Judgment, the bust of Brutus, and some keen
psychological designs--character is sacrificed to a studied ideal of
form, so far as the face is concerned. That he did this wilfully, on
principle, is certain. The proof remains in the twenty heads of those
incomparable genii of the Sistine, each one of whom possesses a beauty
and a quality peculiar to himself alone. They show that, if he had so
chosen, he could have played upon the human countenance with the same
facility as on the human body, varying its expressiveness _ad
infinitum_.

Why Michelangelo preferred to generalise the face and to particularise
the body remains a secret buried in the abysmal deeps of his
personality. In his studies from the model, unlike Lionardo, he almost
always left the features vague, while working out the trunk and limbs
with strenuous passion. He never seems to have been caught and
fascinated by the problem offered by the eyes and features of a male
or female. He places masks or splendid commonplaces upon frames
palpitant and vibrant with vitality in pleasure or in anguish.

In order to guard against an apparent contradiction, I must submit
that, when Michelangelo particularised the body and the limbs, he
strove to make them the symbols of some definite passion or emotion.
He se