Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/86

64 a feeling for nature. He has traced no flowers like those with which Lionardo stars over his gloomiest rocks; nothing like the fretwork of wings and flames in which Blake frames his most startling conceptions; no forest-scenery like Titian's fills his backgrounds, but only blank ranges of rock and dim vegetable forms as blank as they, as in a world before the creation of the first five days.

Of the whole story of the creation he has painted only the creation of the first man and woman, and, for him at least, feebly, the creation of light. It belongs to the quality of his genius thus to concern itself almost exclusively with the creation of man. For him it is not, as in the story itself, the last and crowning act of a series of developments, but the first and unique act, the creation of life itself in its supreme form, off-hand and immediately, in the cold and lifeless stone. With him the beginning of life has all the characteristics of resurrection; it is like the recovery of suspended health or animation, with its gratitude, its effusion, and eloquence. Fair as the young men of the Elgin marbles, the Adam of the Sistine Chapel is unlike them in a total absence of that balance and completeness which expresses so well the sentiment of a self-contained, independent life. In that languid figure there is something rough and satyr-like, something akin to the rough hill-side