eligion of the beyond; he
blended the finest blossom of Hellenism with the profoundest spirit of
Christianity; he sublimated Plato and Dante into a higher intuition; the
_eroico furore_ of his contemporary, Giordano, had found an embodiment.
The two great rays which illuminated his life: the perfect earthly
beauty to which destiny had called him, and the boundless religious
longing, the last fundamental force of his soul, converged in the
glorified woman. Vittoria appeared to him as the solution of the
world-discord, a solution which he had no right to expect, a miracle.
She was the greatest experience of his great life, an experience which
almost broke him. More than once the thought of Vittoria filled him with
sudden dread. In her he had seen God and the world in one. The powerful
effect of this on so self-reliant a character, a man who had been unable
to find much sympathy with patrons and friends, to whom women had meant
nothing, may easily be imagined. All at once he had found a centre, and
more than that--a solution of all the discords of life, of the eternal
dualism of the earthly and the divine. His love was not the love of a
youth stretching out feelers to the world beyond, but the final creed of
a lonely life which had known nothing but beauty and divinity. With the
passion characteristic of him, he threw himself into this new experience
and made it his fate, flinging world and art aside. Before Vittoria he
ceased to be a sculptor and became a worshipper.

We realise the great difference between this worship and the worship of
Dante. The latter formed the consciousness of eternity, and became a
poet, early in life. He never doubted the profoundest truth, the
metaphysical importance of his love; but in the case of Michelangelo,
the love of an old man was the last event in a life consumed by
restlessness. The adoration of this mysogynist was almost an act of
despair; not a sweet delivery from doubt, but a source of fresh shocks.
It problematised his whole previous existence and nullified the work of
his life. For before this new experience--perfection, met in the
flesh--art broke down. The greatest of sculptors never made an attempt
to imprison the beauty which had appeared to his soul in marble or in
canvas, deeply convinced that such an achievement was beyond the power
of earthly endeavour.

Before Vittoria Michelangelo became deeply conscious of his inmost self;
she gave direction to his longing and was its