Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/391

1564] ately-striving, much-suffering soul. No artist felt the joy and glory of life more keenly, no one was more oppressed with a sense of its weariness and misery. His own life was one long tragedy of broken hopes and frustrated purposes. But from boyhood to old age his mighty powers were devoted with unswerving constancy to the service of art, and in spite of hindrances and disappointments he fulfilled the end of life, and revealed himself in a series of great and heroic conceptions.

Like Leonardo, Michelangelo was a many-sided genius, and three supreme conceptions—the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, the Medici tombs, and the Dome of St. Peter—remain to prove his skill as architect, sculptor, and painter. But, unlike his great rival, sculpture and not painting was the form in which he preferred to express his thoughts. Painting, as he told Pope Julius II., was not his trade, and in all his letters from Rome, he signed himself "Michelangelo, scultore," as if to emphasise this statement. "Let the whole world know I am not a painter," are the words with which he ends one of his sonnets, in which the same conviction is expressed. His paintings tell the same story. All their finest qualities, their masterly design, vigorous modelling, and admirable relief, betray the sculptor's hand, and show the same passion for plastic beauty. In later years his enthusiasm for science and marvellous knowledge of anatomy led him to crowd his frescoes with exaggerated gestures and distorted attitudes. He neglected beauty for strength, and allowed force to degenerate into brutality. But in spite of these obvious defects,