mmeo's, so singularly akin to Andrea del
Sarto's, Giorgione's pen-and-ink sketch for a Lucretia, are seen at
once by their richness and blurred outlines to be the work of
colourists. Signorelli's transcripts from the nude, remarkably similar
to those of Michelangelo, reveal a sculptor rather than a painter.
Botticelli, with all his Florentine precision, shows that, like
Lionardo, he was a seeker and a visionary in his anxious feeling after
curve and attitude. Mantegna seems to be graving steel or cutting into
marble. It is easy to apply this analysis in succession to any
draughtsman who has style. To do so would, however, be superfluous: we
should only be enforcing what is a truism to all intelligent students
of art--namely, that each individual stamps his own specific quality
upon his handiwork; reveals even in the neutral region of design his
innate preference for colour or pure form as a channel of expression;
betrays the predominance of mental energy or sensuous charm, of
scientific curiosity or plastic force, of passion or of tenderness,
which controls his nature. This inevitable and unconscious revelation
of the man in art-work strikes us as being singularly modern. We do
not apprehend it to at all the same extent in the sculpture of the
ancients, whether it be that our sympathies are too remote from Greek
and Roman ways of feeling, or whether the ancients really conceived
art more collectively in masses, less individually as persons.

No master exhibits this peculiarly modern quality more decisively than
Michelangelo, and nowhere is the personality of his genius, what marks
him off and separates him from all fellow-men, displayed with fuller
emphasis than in his drawings. To use the words of a penetrative
critic, from whom it is a pleasure to quote: "The thing about
Michelangelo is this; he is not, so to say, at the head of a class,
but he stands apart by himself: he is not possessed of a skill which
renders him unapproached or unapproachable; but rather, he is of so
unique an order, that no other artist whatever seems to suggest
comparison with him." Mr. Selwyn Image goes on to define in what a
true sense the words "creator" and "creative" may be applied to him:
how the shows and appearances of the world were for him but
hieroglyphs of underlying ideas, with which his soul was familiar, and
from which he worked again outward; "his learning and skill in the
arts supplying to his hand such large and adequate symbo