Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/105

Rh of his on the tradition of the Florentine schools, is nowhere seen more clearly than in his treatment of the Creation. The Creation of Man had haunted the mind of the middle age like a dream; and weaving it into a hundred carved ornaments of capital or doorway, the Italian sculptors had early impressed upon it that pregnancy of expression which seems to give it many veiled meanings. As with other artistic conceptions of the middle age, its treatment became almost conventional, handed on from artist to artist, with slight changes, till it came to have almost an independent abstract existence of its own. It was characteristic of the mediæval mind thus to give an independent traditional existence to a special pictorial conception, or to a legend, like that of 'Tristram' or 'Tannhäuser,' or even to the very thoughts and substance of a book, like the 'Imitation,' so that no single workman could claim it as his own, and the book, the image, the legend, had itself a legend, and its fortunes, and a personal history; and it is a sign of the mediævalism of Michelangelo that he thus receives from tradition his central conception, and does but add the last touches in transferring it to the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.

But there was another tradition of those earlier, more serious Florentines of which Michelangelo is the inheritor, to which he gives the final