These illusions of the senses distract the
soul from the only realities, eternal ideas."

Michelangelo reasoned thus in his disdain of all exact reproduction of
nature. He had studied it with passion but, in order to discover its
laws, he regarded it as an enemy which held the human spirit prisoner.
He wanted to free himself from it, he wanted to make of it an instrument
for his thought. That is why he sought for and discovered its machinery,
and when he could guide it at will he outraged it; he made it produce
unprecedented results. He constructed for himself out of his profound
knowledge of anatomy a general idea of man, and thereafter, without
having recourse to any observation of individuals, he recreated the
whole of nature in the image of his ideas and in the likeness of God,
source and originator of ideas.

Come dal foco 'l cald' 'esser' diviso
Nom puo 'l bel dall' eterno; e la mia stima
Esalta che ne scende, e chi 'l somiglia.

"As heat can not be separated from fire, so beauty can not be from
eternity; and my thought extols what comes from it and what resembles
it."

[Illustration: CHARON'S BOAT

Detail from The Last Judgment (1536-1541). Sistine Chapel.]

He wanted to express in his work only what was eternal, and he did not
believe he could do this with external objects. He tried, therefore, to
give to everything he did a character of compelling force. His Platonic
idealism was lined with Christian pessimism. Like Vittoria Colonna, he
was filled with the sense of the beauty of all human things, and he was
obsessed with the idea of death.

He lived in an exhausted epoch which no longer had any happy sense of
reality. In God was the only help, in the eternal and immutable
perfection. Michelangelo was filled with dislike for all realism. Like
Plato, he despised painting in comparison with sculpture.

"Painting seems to me the better the more it resembles sculpture, and
the sculpture worse the more it resembles painting. Sculpture is the
torch of painting, and between the two there is the same difference as
between the sun and the moon."[134]

If he was above all things a sculptor it was because he found in
sculpture the most appropriate expression of his abstract and
concentrated genius.

Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto,
Ch'un marmo solo in se non circonscriva
Col suo soverchio, et solo a quello arriva
La man, che ubbidisce all'intelleto.[135]

Moreover he reduc