d the writings of Plotinus--his greatest
pupil--were after two thousand years translated and elucidated. Many
read and a few understood, but only in Michelangelo did the spirit of
Platonic Hellenism revive and become productive; the Platonic ideal of a
purely masculine culture, aesthetically and spiritually perfect,
illumined his soul; once again the unconditional cult of beauty and the
love of the perfect male form, which speaks to us from the _Dialogues_,
quickened an imagination, and boyhood and youth were portrayed in a
manner which has never since been equalled.

Nearly all Michelangelo's youthful male figures--with the exception,
perhaps, of the gigantic David--deviate from the decidedly masculine and
approach the mean, the human in the abstract; thus they seem to us
imbued with a quality of femininity; they even exhibit decidedly female
characteristics. I have in mind first and foremost the youths depicted
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (the most soulful adolescent
figures in the world), but also Bacchus, St. John, Adonis and the
figures in the background of the Holy Family at Florence. Cupid and
David Apollo (in the Bargello) are almost hermaphroditic, and even the
Adam, and the unfinished Slaves in the Bobili Gardens exhibit female
characteristics. Without going further into detail I would draw
attention to the breasts and thighs, which positively raise a doubt on
the question of sex. (I am referring to the two youths above the
Erythrean Sybil.) Seen from a distance they create the impression of
female figures, while the youth above Jeremiah is a perfect Hellenic
_ephebos_. On the other hand--with the exception of two of his early
Madonnas and, perhaps, Eve--he has not given us one glorified female
figure; all his women are characterised by something careworn and
unlovely; some of his old women--most strikingly the Cumaic Sybil--are
depicted with absolutely masculine features, masculine figures and
gigantic musculature. His ideal was the Hellenic ideal, was a human form
neither man nor woman; all extremes, but also all peculiarities and
everything personal, were, if not completely suppressed, at any rate
pushed into the background. We regard this ideal, which is alien to our
inherent nature, with a feeling akin to contempt, for the modern ideal
is male and female, but it nevertheless was of great moment in the
obliteration of sex and the accentuation of the purely human. The
Platonic (and also Michelangel