Still, the breath of life has exaled from all those bodies, and the tyranny of the schematic ideal of form is felt in each of them.  Without meaning to be irreverent, we might fancy that two elastic lay-figures, one male, the other female, both singularly similar in shape, supplied the materials for the total composition.  Of the dramatic intentions and suggestions underlying these plastic and elastic shapes I am not now speaking.  It is my present business to establish the phases through which my master’s sense of form passed from its cradle to its grave.

In the frescoes of the Cappella Paolina, so ruined at this day that we can hardly value them, the mechanic manner of the fourth stage seems to reach its climax.  Ghosts of their former selves, they still reveal the poverty of creative and spontaneous inspiration which presided over their nativity.

Michelangelo’s fourth manner might be compared with that of Milton in “Paradise Regained” and “Samson Agonistes.”  Both of these great artists in old age exaggerate the defects of their qualities.  Michelangelo’s ideal of line and proportion in the human form becomes stereotyped and strained, as do Milton’s rhythms and his Latinisms.  The generous wine of the Bacchus and of “Comus,” so intoxicating in its newness, the same wine in the Sistine and “Paradise Lost,” so overwhelming in its mature strength, has acquired an austere aridity.  Yet, strange to say, amid these autumn stubbles of declining genius we light upon oases more sweet, more tenderly suggestive, than aught the prime produced.  It is not my business to speak of Milton here.  I need not recall his “Knights of Logres and of Lyonesse,” or resume his Euripidean garlands showered on Samson’s grave.  But, for my master Michelangelo, it will suffice to observe that all the grace his genius held, refined, of earthly grossness quit, appeared, under the dominance of this fourth manner, in the mythological subjects he composed for Tommaso Cavalieri, and, far more nobly, in his countless studies for the celebration of Christ’s Passion.  The designs bequeathed to us from this period are very numerous.  They were never employed in the production of any monumental work of sculpture or of painting.  For this very reason, because they were occasional improvisations, preludes, dreams of things to be, they preserve the finest bloom, the Indian summer of his fancy.  Lovers of Michelangelo must dedicate their latest and most loving studies to this phase of his fourth manner.

X

If we seek to penetrate the genius of an artist, not merely forming a correct estimate of his technical ability and science, but also probing his personality to the core, as near as this is possible for us to do, we ought to give our undivided study to his drawings.  It is there, and there alone, that we come face to face with the real man, in his unguarded moments, in his hours of inspiration, in the laborious effort