Michael Angelo stands so far apart from other men, and is so gigantic a force for good and evil in the history of art, that to estimate his life and labour in relation to the Renaissance must form the subject of a separate chapter.  For the present it is enough to observe that his immediate scholars, Raffaello da Montelupo, and Gian Angelo Montorsoli, caught little from their master but the mannerism of contorted form and agitated action.  This mannerism, a blemish even in the strong work of Buonarroti, became ridiculous when adopted by men of feeble powers and passionless imagination.  By straining the art of sculpture to its utmost limits, Michael Angelo expressed vehement emotions in marble; and the forced attitudes affected in his work had their value as significant of spiritual struggle.  His imitators showed none of their master’s sublime force, none of that terribilita which made him unapproachable in social intercourse and inimitable in art.  They merely fancied that dignity and beauty were to be achieved by placing figures in difficult postures, exaggerated muscular anatomy, and twisting the limbs of their models upon sections of ellipses in uncomfortable attitudes, till the whole of their work was writhen into uncouth lines.  Buonarroti himself was not responsible for these results.  He wrought out his own ideal with the firmness of a genius that obeys the law of its own nature, doing always what it must.  That the decadence of sculpture into truculent bravado was independent of his direct influence, is further proved by the inefficiency of his contemporaries.

Baccio Bandinelli and Bartolommeo Ammanati filled the squares of the Italian cities with statues of Hercules and Satyrs, Neptune and River-gods.  We know not whether to select the vulgarity, the feebleness, or the pretentiousness of these pseudo-classical colossi for condemnation.  They have nothing Greek about them but their names, their nakedness, and their association with myths, the significance whereof was never really felt by the sculptors.  Some of Bandinelli’s designs, it is true, are vigorous; but they are mere drawings from undraped peasants, life studies depicting the human animal.  His “Hercules and Cacus,” while it deserves all the sarcasm hurled at it by Cellini, proves that Bandinelli could not rise above the wrestling bout of a porter and a coal-heaver.  Nor would it be possible to invent a motive less in accordance with Greek taste than the conceit of Ammanati’s fountain at Castello, where Hercules by squeezing the body of Antaeus makes the drinking water of a city spout from a giant’s mouth.  Such pitiful misapplications of an art which is designed to elevate the commonplace of human form, and to render permanent the nobler qualities of physical existence, show how superficially and wrongly the antique spirit had been apprehended.