ems to have been more anxious about the suggestions afforded by
their pose and muscular employment than he was about the expression of
the features. But we shall presently discover that, so far as pure
physical type is concerned, he early began to generalise the structure
of the body, passing finally into what may not unjustly be called a
mannerism of form.

These points may be still further illustrated by what a competent
critic has recently written upon Michelangelo's treatment of form. "No
one," says Professor Bruecke, "ever knew so well as Michelangelo
Buonarroti how to produce powerful and strangely harmonious effects by
means of figures in themselves open to criticism, simply by his mode
of placing and ordering them, and of distributing their lines. For him
a figure existed only in his particular representation of it; how it
would have looked in any other position was a matter of no concern to
him." We may even go further, and maintain that Michelangelo was
sometimes wilfully indifferent to the physical capacities of the human
body in his passionate research of attitudes which present picturesque
and novel beauty. The ancients worked on quite a different method.
They created standard types which, in every conceivable posture, would
exhibit the grace and symmetry belonging to well-proportioned frames.
Michelangelo looked to the effect of a particular posture. He may have
been seduced by his habit of modelling figures in clay instead of
going invariably to the living subject, and so may have handled nature
with unwarrantable freedom. Anyhow, we have here another demonstration
of his romanticism.

VIII

The true test of the highest art is that it should rightly represent
the human form. Agreed upon this point, it remains for us to consider
in what way Michelangelo conceived and represented the human form. If
we can discover his ideal, his principles, his leading instincts in
this decisive matter, we shall unlock, so far as that is possible, the
secret of his personality as man and artist. The psychological quality
of every great master must eventually be determined by his mode of
dealing with the phenomena of sex.

In Pheidias we find a large impartiality. His men and women are cast
in the same mould of grandeur, inspired with equal strength and
sweetness, antiphonal notes in dual harmony. Praxiteles leans to the
female, Lysippus to the male; and so, through all the gamut of the
figurative craftsmen, we discov