female type he afterwards preferred, resembles that of a young woman.  For this he was rebuked by critics who thought that her age should correspond more naturally to that of her adult son.  Condivi reports that Michelangelo explained his meaning in the following words:  “Do you not know that chaste women maintain their freshness far longer than the unchaste?  How much more would this be the case with a virgin, into whose breast there never crept the least lascivious desire which could affect the body?  Nay, I will go further, and hazard the belief that this unsullied bloom of youth, besides being maintained in her by natural causes, may have been miraculously wrought to convince the world of the virginity and perpetual purity of the Mother.  This was not necessary for the Son.  On the contrary, in order to prove that the Son of God took upon himself, as in very truth he did take, a human body, and became subject to all that an ordinary man is subject to, with the exception of sin; the human nature of Christ, instead of being superseded by the divine, was left to the operation of natural laws, so that his person revealed the exact age to which he had attained.  You need not, therefore, marvel if, having regard to these considerations, I made the most Holy Virgin, Mother of God, much younger relatively to her Son than women of her years usually appear, and left the Son such as his time of life demanded.”  “This reasoning,” adds Condivi, “was worthy of some learned theologian, and would have been little short of marvellous in most men, but not in him, whom God and Nature fashioned, not merely to be peerless in his handiwork, but also capable of the divinest concepts, as innumerable discourses and writings which we have of his make clearly manifest.”

The Christ is also somewhat youthful, and modelled with the utmost delicacy; suggesting no lack of strength, but subordinating the idea of physical power to that of a refined and spiritual nature.  Nothing can be more lovely than the hands, the feet, the arms, relaxed in slumber.  Death becomes immortally beautiful in that recumbent figure, from which the insults of the scourge, the cross, the brutal lance have been erased.  Michelangelo did not seek to excite pity or to stir devotion by having recourse to those mediaeval ideas which were so passionately expressed in S. Bernard’s hymn to the Crucified.  The aesthetic tone of his dead Christ is rather that of some sweet solemn strain of cathedral music, some motive from a mass of Palestrina or a Passion of Sebastian Bach.  Almost involuntarily there rises to the memory that line composed by Bion for the genius of earthly loveliness bewailed by everlasting beauty—­

  E’en as a corpse he is fair, fair corpse as fallen aslumber.

It is said that certain Lombards passing by and admiring the Pieta ascribed it to Christoforo Solari of Milan, surnamed Il Gobbo.  Michelangelo, having happened to overhear them, shut himself up in the chapel, and engraved the belt upon the Madonna’s breast with his own name.  This he never did with any other of his works.