eing so altered from the common usage of other architects as to
excite astonishment in all who see it."

What emerges with distinctness from Vasari's account of Michelangelo's
work at S. Lorenzo is that a practical Italian architect, who had been
engaged on buildings of importance since this work was carried out,
believed it to have infused freedom and new vigour into architecture.
That freedom and new vigour we now know to have implied the Barocco
style.

IV

In estimating Michelangelo's work at S. Lorenzo, we must not forget
that at this period of his life he contemplated statuary, bronze
bas-relief, and painting, as essential adjuncts to architecture. The
scheme is, therefore, not so much constructive as decorative, and a
great many of its most offensive qualities may be ascribed to the fact
that the purposes for which it was designed have been omitted. We know
that the facade of S. Lorenzo was intended to abound in bronze and
marble carvings. Beside the Medicean tombs, the sacristy ought to have
contained a vast amount of sculpture, and its dome was actually
painted in fresco by Giovanni da Udine under Michelangelo's own eyes.
It appears that his imagination still obeyed those leading principles
which he applied in the rough sketch for the first sepulchre of
Julius. The vestibule and staircase of the library cannot therefore be
judged fairly now; for if they had been finished according to their
maker's plan, the faults of their construction would have been
compensated by multitudes of plastic shapes.

M. Charles Gamier, in _L'OEuvre et la Vie_, speaking with the
authority of a practical architect, says: "Michelangelo was not,
properly speaking, an architect. He made architecture, which is quite
a different thing; and most often it was the architecture of a painter
and sculptor, which points to colour, breadth, imagination, but also
to insufficient studies and incomplete education. The thought may be
great and strong, but the execution of it is always feeble and
naive.... He had not learned the language of the art. He has all the
qualities of imagination, invention, will, which form a great
composer; but he does not know the grammar, and can hardly write....
In seeking the great, he has too often found the tumid; seeking the
original, he has fallen upon the strange, and also on bad taste."

There is much that is true in this critique, severe though it may seem
to be. The fact is that Michelangelo aimed at pic