al world peculiar to the
master press in so immediately, without modification and without
mitigation, upon our sentient imagination. I sometimes dream that the
inhabitants of the moon may be like Michelangelo's men and women, as I
feel sure its landscape resembles his conception of the material
universe.

What I have called Michelangelo's third manner, the purest
manifestation of which is to be found in the vault of the Sistine,
sustained itself for a period of many years. The surviving fragments
of sculpture for the tomb of Julius, especially the Captives of the
Louvre and the statues in the Sacristy at S. Lorenzo, belong to this
stage. A close and intimate _rapport_ with Nature can be perceived in
all the work he designed and executed during the pontificates of Leo
and Clement. The artist was at his fullest both of mental energy and
physical vigour. What he wrought now bears witness to his plenitude of
manhood. Therefore, although the type fixed for the Sistine
prevailed--I mean that generalisation of the human form in certain
wilfully selected proportions, conceived to be ideally beautiful or
necessary for the grand style in vast architectonic schemes of
decoration--still it is used with an exquisite sensitiveness to the
pose and structure of the natural body, a delicate tact in the
definition of muscle and articulation, an acute feeling for the
qualities of flesh and texture. None of the creations of this period,
moreover, are devoid of intense animating emotions and ideas.

Unluckily, during all the years which intervened between the Sistine
vault and the Last Judgment, Michelangelo was employed upon
architectural problems and engineering projects, which occupied his
genius in regions far removed from that of figurative art. It may,
therefore, be asserted, that although he did not retrograde from want
of practice, he had no opportunity of advancing further by the
concentration of his genius on design. This accounts, I think, for the
change in his manner which we notice when he began to paint in Rome
under Pope Paul III. The fourth stage in his development of form is
reached now. He has lost nothing of his vigour, nothing of his
science. But he has drifted away from Nature. All the innumerable
figures of the Last Judgment, in all their varied attitudes, with
divers moods of dramatic expression, are diagrams wrought out
imaginatively from the stored-up resources of a lifetime. It may be
argued that it was impossib