Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/390

338 Platonist scholars formed the great master's ideas and moulded his genius, but he clung to the faith of past ages with unshaken trust, and inherited the creed of Dante and the Christian sentiment of early Tuscan sculptors. So, while he became the creator of a new and original style, he held fast to the old traditions, and in his art we find the seriousness and devotion of the Middle Ages, widened and deepened by the knowledge of Plato. "Because the beauty of the world is fragile and deceitful," he writes, "I seek to attain the eternal and universal Beauty." Early in life the study of the antiques in the Medici Palace inspired him with a profound sense of the beauty and wonder of the human form, and he realised what such artists as Antonio Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli had dimly felt before, that the most complete rendering of life and movement can only be attained by means of the nude. While Leonardo loved Nature in all its varied forms, and lingered tenderly over the smallest details of rock and flower, Michelangelo's thoughts were wholly centred on the study of man. "God," as he says in one of his sonnets, "has nowhere revealed Himself more fully than in the sublime beauty of the human form." From the first, the great master saw and understood the full significance of the body, its value for decorative purposes, and as a means of expressing spiritual and intellectual thought. Again, while Leonardo's art owes its serenity and repose to his clear and lucid intellect, Michelangelo's creations all bear the stamp of his restless and struggling nature. The most subjective of artists, every picture he painted and every statue he carved tell the secrets of his deep thinking, passion-