display a sublime sense of
facial beauty. The Eve of the Temptation has even something of
positively feminine charm. This is probably due to the fact that
Michelangelo here studied expression and felt the necessity of
dramatic characterisation in this part of his work. He struck each
chord of what may be called the poetry of figurative art, from the
epic cantos of Creation, Fall, and Deluge, through the tragic odes
uttered by prophets and sibyls down to the lyric notes of the genii,
and the sweet idyllic strains of the groups in the lunettes and
spandrels.

It cannot be said that even here Michelangelo felt the female nude as
sympathetically as he felt the male. The women in the picture of the
Deluge are colossal creatures, scarcely distinguishable from the men
except by their huge bosoms. His personal sense of beauty finds
fullest expression in the genii. The variations on one theme of
youthful loveliness and grace are inexhaustible; the changes rung on
attitude, and face, and feature are endless. The type, as I have said,
has already become schematic. It is adolescent, but the adolescence is
neither that of the Greek athlete nor that of the nude model. Indeed,
it is hardly natural; nor yet is it ideal in the Greek sense of that
term. The physical gracefulness of a slim ephebus was never seized by
Michelangelo. His Ganymede displays a massive trunk and brawny thighs.
Compare this with the Ganymede of Titian. Compare the Cupid at South
Kensington with the Praxitelean Genius of the Vatican--the Adonis and
the Bacchus of the Bargello with Hellenic statues. The bulk and force
of maturity are combined with the smoothness of boyhood and with a
delicacy of face that borders on the feminine.

It is an arid region, the region of this mighty master's spirit. There
are no heavens and no earth or sea in it; no living creatures,
forests, flowers; no bright colours, brilliant lights, or cavernous
darks. In clear grey twilight appear a multitude of naked forms, both
male and female, yet neither male nor female of the actual world;
rather the brood of an inventive intellect, teeming with
preoccupations of abiding thoughts and moods of feeling, which become
for it incarnate in these stupendous figures. It is as though
Michelangelo worked from the image in his brain outwards to a physical
presentment supplied by his vast knowledge of life, creating forms
proper to his own specific concept.

Nowhere else in plastic art does the ment