Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/87

Rh on which it lies. His whole form is gathered into an expression of mere expectation and reception; he has hardly strength enough to lift his finger to touch the finger of the creator; yet a touch of the finger-tips will suffice.

This creation of life, life coming always as relief or recovery, and always in strong contrast with the rough-hewn mass in which it is kindled, is in various ways the motive of all his work, whether its immediate subject be Pagan or Christian, legend or allegory; and this, although at least one half of his work was designed for the adornment of tombs—the tomb of Julius, the tombs of the Medici. Not the Judgment but the Resurrection is the real subject of his last work in the Sistine; and his favourite Pagan subject is the legend of Leda, the delight of the world breaking from the egg of a bird. He secures that ideality of expression, which in Greek sculpture depends on a delicate system of abstraction, and in early Italian sculpture on lowness of relief, by an incompleteness which is surely not always undesigned, and which I suppose no one regrets, and trusts to the spectator to complete the half-emerged form. And as his persons have something of the unwrought stone about them, so as if to realise the expression by which the old Florentine records describe a sculptor, master of live stone, with him the very rocks seem to have life;