ature which the
representation of feeling in sculpture must always have. What time and
accident, its centuries of darkness under the furrows of the "little
Melian farm," have done with singular felicity of touch for the Venus of
Melos, fraying its surface and softening its lines, so that some spirit
in the thing seems always on the point of breaking out, as though in it
classical sculpture had advanced already one step into the mystical
Christian age, its expression being in the whole range of ancient work
most like that of Michelangelo's own:--this effect Michelangelo gains by
leaving nearly all his sculpture in a puzzling sort of incompleteness,
which suggests rather than realises actual form. Something of the
wasting of that snow-image which he moulded at the command of Piero de'
Medici, when the snow lay one night in the court of the Pitti palace,
almost always lurks about it, as if he had determined to make the
quality of a task, exacted from him half in derision, the pride of all
his work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness, suspecting,
however, that Michelangelo himself loved and was loath to change it, and
feeling at the same time that they too would lose something if the
half-realised form ever quite emerged from the stone, so rough hewn
here, so delicately finished there; and they have wished to fathom the
charm of this incompleteness. Well! that incompleteness is
Michelangelo's equivalent for colour in sculpture; it is his way of
etherealising pure form, of relieving its hard realism, and
communicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was a
characteristic too which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode of
life, his disappointments and hesitations. And it was in reality perfect
finish. In this way he combines the utmost amount of passion and
intensity with the sense of a yielding and flexible life: he gets not
vitality merely, but a wonderful force of expression.

Midway between these two systems--the system of the Greek sculptors and
the system of Michelangelo--comes the system of Luca della Robbia. And
the other Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century, partaking both of
the Allgemeinheit of the Greeks, their way of extracting certain select
elements only of pure form and sacrificing all the rest, and the studied
incompleteness of Michelangelo, relieving that expression of intensity,
passion, energy, which might otherwise have hardened into caricature.
Like Michelangelo, these scul