le emphasis
upon the damnation of the wicked, hurled down to external torment by the
sentence, "Depart from me, ye cursed," uttered by Christ, not the meek
and gentle Man of Sorrows, but the _rex tremendae majestatis_, a
Hercules, before whom Mary trembles and the whole of creation shudders.
A quieter, but no less tragic work of art is the sculpture on the tomb of
Lorenzo de' Medici at Florence. The hero himself sits above, and both he
and the four allegorical figures, two men and two women, commonly called
Day and Night, Morning and Evening, are lost in pensive, eternal sorrow.
So they brood for ever as if seeking in sleep and dumb forgetfulness some
anodyne for the sense of their country's and their race's doom.

But it is not all pain. Titian has not made joy nor Raphael love nor
Leonardo wonder so beautiful as Michelangelo has made tragedy. His
sonnets breathe a worship of beauty as the symbol of divine love. He is
like the great, dark angel of Victor Hugo:

Et l'ange devint noir, et dit:--Je suis l'amour.
Mais son front sombre etait plus charmant que le jour,
Et je voyais, dans l'ombre ou brillaient ses prunelles,
Les astres a travers les plumes de ses ailes.

The contrast between the fertility of Italian artistic genius and the
comparative poverty of Northern Europe is most apparent when the northern
painters copied most closely their transalpine brothers. The taste for
Italian pictures was spread abroad by the many {683} travelers, and the
demand created a supply of copies and imitations. Antwerp became a
regular factory of such works, whereas the Germans, Cranach, Duerer and
Holbein were profoundly affected by Italy. Of them all Holbein
[Sidenote: Hans Holbein the Younger, 1497-1543] was the only one who
could really compete with the Italians on their own ground, and that only
in one branch of art, portraiture. His studies of Henry VIII, and of his
wives and courtiers, combine truth to nature with a high sense of beauty.
His paintings of More and Erasmus express with perfect mastery the finest
qualities of two rare natures.

[Sidenote: Albert Duerer, 1471-1528]

Duerer seldom succeeded in painting pictures of the most beautiful type,
but a few of his portraits can be compared with nothing save Leonardo's
studies. The whole of a man's life and character are set forth in his
two drawings of his friend Pirckheimer, a strange blend of the
philosopher and the hog. And the tragedy is that the