not but fail.  But where else in the whole world of art shall we receive such blasts of energy as from this giant’s dream, or, if you will, nightmare?  For kindred reasons, the “Crucifixion of Peter” is a failure.  Art can be only life-communicating and life-enhancing.  If it treats of pain and death, these must always appear as manifestations and as results only of living resolutely and energetically.  What chance is there, I ask, for this, artistically the only possible treatment, in the representation of a man crucified with his head downwards?  Michelangelo could do nothing but make the bystanders, the executioners, all the more life-communicating, and therefore inevitably more sympathetic!  No wonder he failed here!  What a tragedy, by the way, that the one subject perfectly cut out for his genius, the one subject which required none but genuinely artistic treatment, his “Bathers,” executed forty years before these last works, has disappeared, leaving but scant traces!  Yet even these suffice to enable the competent student to recognise that this composition must have been the greatest masterpiece in figure art of modern times.

That Michelangelo had faults of his own is undeniable.  As he got older, and his genius, lacking its proper outlets, tended to stagnate and thicken, he fell into exaggerations—­exaggerations of power into brutality, of tactile values into feats of modelling.  No doubt he was also at times as indifferent to representation as Botticelli!  But while there is such a thing as movement, there is no such thing as tactile values without representation.  Yet he seems to have dreamt of presenting nothing but tactile values:  hence his many drawings with only the torso adequately treated, the rest unheeded.  Still another result from his passion for tactile values.  I have already suggested that Giotto’s types were so massive because such figures most easily convey values of touch.  Michelangelo tended to similar exaggerations, to making shoulders, for instance, too broad and too bossy, simply because they make thus a more powerful appeal to the tactile imagination.  Indeed, I venture to go even farther, and suggest that his faults in all the arts, sculpture no less than painting, and architecture no less than sculpture, are due to this self-same predilection for salient projections.  But the lover of the figure arts for what in them is genuinely artistic and not merely ethical, will in Michelangelo, even at his worst, get such pleasures as, excepting a few, others, even at their best, rarely give him.

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[Page heading:  CONSTANT AIMS OF FLORENTINE ART]

In closing, let us note what results clearly even from this brief account of the Florentine school, namely that, although no Florentine merely took up and continued a predecessor’s work, nevertheless all, from first to last, fought for the same cause.  There is no opposition between Giotto and Michelangelo.  The best energies of the first, of the last, and of all the intervening great Florentine artists were persistently devoted to the rendering of tactile values, or of movement, or of both.  Now successful grappling with problems of form and of movement is at the bottom of all the higher arts; and because of this fact, Florentine painting, despite its many faults, is, after Greek sculpture, the most serious figure art in existence.