ves. If one wishes to feel
the power of Savonarola, one may do so in these sonnets. We had
connected Michael Angelo with the Renaissance, but we are here face to
face with the Reformation. We cannot help being a little surprised at
this. We cannot help being surprised at finding how well we know this
man.

Few of us are familiar enough with the language of the plastic arts to
have seen without prompting this same modern element in Michael Angelo's
painting and sculpture. We might, perhaps, have recognized it in the
Pieta in St. Peter's. We may safely say, however, that it exists in all
his works. It is in the Medicean statues; it is in the Julian marbles;
it is in the Sistine ceiling. What is there in these figures that they
leave us so awestruck, that they seem so like the sound of trumpets
blowing from a spiritual world? The intelligence that could call them
forth, the craft that could draw them, have long since perished. But the
meaning survives the craft. The lost arts retain their power over us. We
understand but vaguely, yet we are thrilled. We cannot decipher the
signs, yet we subscribe to their import. The world from which Michael
Angelo's figures speak is our own world, after all. That is the reason
they are so potent, so intimate, so inimitably significant. We may be
sure that the affinity which we feel with Michael Angelo, and do not
feel with any other artist of that age, springs from experiences and
beliefs in him which are similar to our own.

His work speaks to the moral sense more directly and more powerfully
than that of any one,--so directly and so powerfully, indeed, that we
whose physical senses are dull, and whose moral sense is acute, are
moved by Michael Angelo, although the rest of the _cinque cento_ culture
remain a closed book to us.

It is difficult, this conjuring with the unrecoverable past, so rashly
done by us all. Yet we must use what light we have. Remembering, then,
that painting is not the reigning mode of expression in recent times,
and that in dealing with it we are dealing with a vehicle of expression
with which we are not spontaneously familiar, we may yet draw
conclusions which are not fantastic, if we base them upon the identity
of one man's nature some part of which we are sure we understand. We may
throw a bridge from the ground in the sonnets, upon which we are sure we
stand firmly, to the ground in the frescos, which, by reason of our own
ignorance, is less certain ground