s, at best, relief from rage and
respite for a moment from consuming fire. There is a life elemental
rather than human in those mighty limbs; and the passion that twists
them on the marriage-bed has in it the stress of storms, the rampings
and roarings of leopards at play. Take this single line:--

_et Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum._

What a picture of primeval breadth and vastness! The forest is the
world, and the bodies of the lovers are things natural and unashamed,
and Venus is the tyrannous instinct that controls the blood in
spring."

What makes Michelangelo's crudity in his plastic treatment of the
female form the more remarkable is that in his poetry he seems to feel
the influence of women mystically. I shall have to discuss this topic
in another place. It is enough here to say that, with very few
exceptions, we remain in doubt whether he is addressing a woman at
all. There are none of those spontaneous utterances by which a man
involuntarily expresses the outgoings of his heart to a beloved
object, the throb of irresistible emotion, the physical ache, the
sense of wanting, the joys and pains, the hopes and fears, the
ecstasies and disappointments, which belong to genuine passion. The
woman is, for him, an allegory, something he has not approached and
handled. Of her personality we learn nothing. Of her bodily
presentment, the eyes alone are mentioned; and the eyes are treated as
the path to Paradise for souls which seek emancipation from the flesh.
Raffaello's few and far inferior sonnets vibrate with an intense and
potent sensibility to this woman or to that.

Michelangelo's "donna" might just as well be a man; and indeed the
poems he addressed to men, though they have nothing sensual about
them, reveal a finer touch in the emotion of the writer. It is
difficult to connect this vaporous incorporeal "donna" of the poems
with those brawny colossal adult females of the statues, unless we
suppose that Michelangelo remained callous both to the physical
attractions and the emotional distinction of woman as she actually is.

I have tried to demonstrate that, plastically, he did not understand
women, and could not reproduce their form in art with sympathetic
feeling for its values of grace, suavity, virginity, and frailty. He
imported masculine qualities into every female theme he handled. The
case is different when we turn to his treatment of the male figure. It
would be impossible to adduce a sing