find also
in the history of Art the same sequence that may be pointed out in its
nature--not indeed in exact order of time, but yet substantially. For
thus is represented in Michelangelo the oldest and mightiest epoch of
liberated Art, that in which it displays its yet uncontrolled strength
in gigantic progeny; as in the fables of the symbolic Fore-world, the
Earth, after the embrace of Uranus, brought forth at first Titans and
heaven-storming giants before the mild reign of the serene gods began.

Thus the painting of the Last Judgment, with which, as the sum of his
art, that giant spirit filled the Sistine Chapel, seems to remind
us more of the first ages of the Earth and its products, than of
its last. Attracted toward the most hidden abysses of organic,
particularly of the human form, he shuns not the Terrible; nay,
he seeks it purposely, and startles it from its repose in the dark
workshops of Nature. Want of delicacy, grace, pleasingness, he
balances by the extremest energy; and if he excites horror by his
representations, it is the terror that, according to fable, the
ancient god Pan spreads around him when he suddenly appears in the
assemblies of men.

It is the method of Nature to produce the extraordinary by isolation
and the exclusion of opposed qualities. Thus, it was necessary that,
in Michelangelo, earnestness and the deep significant energy of Nature
should prevail, rather than a sense of the grace and sensibility that
belong to the Soul, in order to display the extreme of pure plastic
force in the painting of modern times.

After the earlier violence and the vehement impulse of birth is
assuaged, the spirit of Nature is transfigured into Soul, and Grace is
born. This point Art reached, after Leonardo da Vinci, in Correggio,
in whose works the sensuous Soul is the active principle of Beauty.

* * * * *

As the modern fable of Psyche closes the circle of the old mythology;
so Painting, by giving a preponderance to the Soul, attained a new,
though not a higher step of Art.

This Guido Reni strove after, and became the proper painter of the
Soul. Such seems to us to be the necessary interpretation of his whole
endeavor, often uncertain, and, in many of his works, losing itself in
the vague.

This is shown, as, perhaps, in few of his other pictures, in the
masterpiece that is offered to the admiration of all in the great
collection of our king.

In the figure of the