Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/79

Rh farm,' has done with a 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 of it, as if in it classical sculpture had advanced already one step into the mystical Christian age, so that of all ancient work its effect is most like that of Michelangelo's own sculpture;—this effect Michelangelo gains by leaving 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, lurks about all his sculpture, 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, feeling at the same time that they too would lose something if that half-hewn form ever quite emerged from the rough hewn stone: and they have vnshed 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, relieving its hard realism, communicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was a characteristic too which