er more or less affinity for man or
woman. One is swayed by woman and her gracefulness, the other by man
and his vigour. Few have realised the Pheidian perfection of doing
equal justice.

Michelangelo emerges as a mighty master who was dominated by the
vision of male beauty, and who saw the female mainly through the
fascination of the other sex. The defect of his art is due to a
certain constitutional callousness, a want of sensuous or imaginative
sensibility for what is specifically feminine.

Not a single woman carved or painted by the hand of Michelangelo has
the charm of early youth or the grace of virginity. The Eve of the
Sistine, the Madonna of S. Peter's, the Night and Dawn of the Medicean
Sacristy, are female in the anatomy of their large and grandly
modelled forms, but not feminine in their sentiment. This proposition
requires no proof. It is only needful to recall a Madonna by Raphael,
a Diana by Correggio, a Leda by Lionardo, a Venus by Titian, a S.
Agnes by Tintoretto. We find ourselves immediately in a different
region--the region of artists who loved, admired, and comprehended
what is feminine in the beauty and the temperament of women.
Michelangelo neither loved, nor admired, nor yielded to the female
sex. Therefore he could not deal plastically with what is best and
loveliest in the female form. His plastic ideal of the woman is
masculine. He builds a colossal frame of muscle, bone, and flesh,
studied with supreme anatomical science. He gives to Eve the full
pelvis and enormous haunches of an adult matron. It might here be
urged that he chose to symbolise the fecundity of her who was destined
to be the mother of the human race. But if this was his meaning, why
did he not make Adam a corresponding symbol of fatherhood? Adam is an
adolescent man, colossal in proportions, but beardless, hairless; the
attributes of sex in him are developed, but not matured by use. The
Night, for whom no symbolism of maternity was needed, is a woman who
has passed through many pregnancies. Those deeply delved wrinkles on
the vast and flaccid abdomen sufficiently indicate this. Yet when we
turn to Michelangelo's sonnets on Night, we find that he habitually
thought of her as a mysterious and shadowy being, whose influence,
though potent for the soul, disappeared before the frailest of all
creatures bearing light. The Dawn, again, in her deep lassitude, has
nothing of vernal freshness. Built upon the same type as the Night,