she looks like Messalina dragging herself from heavy slumber, for once
satiated as well as tired, stricken for once with the conscience of
disgust. When he chose to depict the acts of passion or of sensual
pleasure, a similar want of sympathy with what is feminine in
womanhood leaves an even more discordant impression on the mind. I
would base the proof of this remark upon the marble Leda of the
Bargello Museum, and an old engraving of Ixion clasping the phantom of
Juno under the form of a cloud. In neither case do we possess
Michelangelo's own handiwork; he must not, therefore, be credited with
the revolting expression, as of a drunken profligate, upon the face of
Leda. Yet in both cases he is indubitably responsible for the general
design, and for the brawny carnality of the repulsive woman. I find it
difficult to resist the conclusion that Michelangelo felt himself
compelled to treat women as though they were another and less graceful
sort of males. The sentiment of woman, what really distinguishes the
sex, whether voluptuously or passionately or poetically apprehended,
emerges in no eminent instance of his work. There is a Cartoon at
Naples for a Bacchante, which Bronzino transferred to canvas and
coloured. This design illustrates the point on which I am insisting.
An athletic circus-rider of mature years, with abnormally developed
muscles, might have posed as model for this female votary of Dionysus.
Before he made this drawing, Michelangelo had not seen those frescoes
of the dancing Bacchantes from Pompeii; nor had he perhaps seen the
Maenads on Greek bas-reliefs tossing wild tresses backwards, swaying
virginal lithe bodies to the music of the tambourine. We must not,
therefore, compare his concept with those masterpieces of the later
classical imagination. Still, many of his contemporaries, vastly
inferior to him in penetrative insight, a Giovanni da Udine, a Perino
del Vaga, a Primaticcio, not to speak of Raffaello or of Lionardo,
felt what the charm of youthful womanhood upon the revel might be. He
remained insensible to the melody of purely feminine lines; and the
only reason why his transcripts from the female form are not gross
like those of Flemish painters, repulsive like Rembrandt's, fleshly
like Rubens's, disagreeable like the drawings made by criminals in
prisons, is that they have little womanly about them.

Lest these assertions should appear too dogmatic, I will indicate the
series of works in which