red
but not fatigued, sad but not melancholy, suggesting that the sleeping
mind of the immortal youth is musing upon solemn dreams. Praxiteles
might have so expressed the Genius of Eternal Repose; but no Greek
sculptor would have given that huge girth to the thorax, or have
exaggerated the mighty hand with such delight in sinewy force. These
qualities, peculiar to Buonarroti's sense of form, do not detract from
the languid pose and supple rhythm of the figure, which flows down, a
sinuous line of beauty, through the slightly swelling flanks, along
the finely moulded thighs, to loveliest feet emerging from the marble.
It is impossible, while gazing on this statue, not to hear a strain of
intellectual music. Indeed, like melody, it tells no story, awakes no
desire, but fills the soul with something beyond thought or passion,
subtler and more penetrating than words.

The companion figure has not equal grace. Athletically muscular,
though adolescent, the body of this young man, whose hands are tied
behind his back, is writhed into an attitude of vehement protest and
rebellion. He raises his face with appealing pain to heaven. The head,
which is only blocked out, overweighs the form, proving that
Michelangelo, unlike the Greeks, did not observe a fixed canon of
proportion for the human frame. This statue bears a strong resemblance
in feeling and conception to the Apollo designed for Baccio Valori.

There are four rough-hewn male figures, eccentrically wrought into the
rock-work of a grotto in the Boboli Gardens, which have been assigned
to the Tomb of Julius. This attribution involves considerable
difficulties. In the first place, the scale is different, and the
stride of one of them, at any rate, is too wide for the pedestals of
that monument. Then their violent contortions and ponderous adult
forms seem to be at variance with the spirit of the Captives. Mr.
Heath Wilson may perhaps be right in his conjecture that Michelangelo
began them for the sculptural decoration on the facade of S. Lorenzo.
Their incompleteness baffles criticism; yet we feel instinctively that
they were meant for the open air and for effect at a considerable
distance. They remind us of Deucalion's men growing out of the stones
he threw behind his back. We could not wish them to be finished, or to
lose their wild attraction, as of primeval beings, the remnants of dim
generations nearer than ourselves to elemental nature. No better
specimens of Buonarro