marble or on frescoed
surfaces. He had exhausted the human form as a symbol of artistic
utterance. But the extraordinary richness of his vein enabled him
still to deal with abstract mathematical proportions in the art of
building, and with rhythms in the art of writing. His best work, both
as architect and poet, belongs to the period when he had lost power as
sculptor and painter. This fact is psychologically interesting. Up to
the age of seventy, he had been working in the plastic and the
concrete. The language he had learned, and used with overwhelming
mastery, was man: physical mankind, converted into spiritual vehicle
by art. His grasp upon this region failed him now. Perhaps there was
not the old sympathy with lovely shapes. Perhaps he knew that he had
played on every gamut of that lyre. Emerging from the sphere of the
sensuous, where ideas take plastic embodiment, he grappled in this
final stage of his career with harmonical ratios and direct verbal
expression, where ideas are disengaged from figurative form. The men
and women, loved by him so long, so wonderfully wrought into
imperishable shapes, "nurslings of immortality," recede. In their room
arise, above the horizon of his intellect, the cupola of S. Peter's
and a few imperishable poems, which will live as long as Italian
claims a place among the languages. There is no comparison to be
instituted between his actual achievements as a builder and a
versifier. The whole tenor of his life made him more competent to deal
with architecture than with literature. Nevertheless, it is
significant that the versatile genius of the man was henceforth
restricted to these two channels of expression, and that in both of
them his last twenty years of existence produced bloom and fruit of
unexpected rarity.

After writing this paragraph, and before I engage in the narrative of
what is certainly the final manifestation of Michelangelo's genius as
a creative artist, I ought perhaps to pause, and to give some account
of those survivals from his plastic impulse, which occupied the old
man's energies for several years. They were entirely the outcome of
religious feeling; and it is curious to notice that he never
approached so nearly to true Christian sentiment as in the fragmentary
designs which we may still abundantly collect from this late autumn of
his artist's life. There are countless drawings for some great picture
of the Crucifixion, which was never finished: exquisite in d