Reduced in scale, and treated
with the arid touch of a feeble craftsman, the linear composition
suggests no large aesthetic charm. It is simply a bas-relief of
carefully selected attitudes and vigorously studied movements
--nineteen men, more or less unclothed, put together with the
scientific view of illustrating possibilities and conquering
difficulties in postures of the adult male body. The extraordinary
effect, as of something superhuman, produced by the Cartoon upon
contemporaries, and preserved for us in Cellini's and Vasari's
narratives, must then have been due to unexampled qualities of
strength in conception, draughtsmanship, and execution. It stung to
the quick an age of artists who had abandoned the representation of
religious sentiment and poetical feeling for technical triumphs and
masterly solutions of mechanical problems in the treatment of the nude
figure. We all know how much more than this Michelangelo had in him to
give, and how unjust it would be to judge a masterpiece from his hand
by the miserable relics now at our disposal. Still I cannot refrain
from thinking that the Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa, taken up by him
as a field for the display of his ability, must, by its very
brilliancy, have accelerated the ruin of Italian art. Cellini, we saw,
placed it above the frescoes of the Sistine. In force, veracity, and
realism it may possibly have been superior to those sublime
productions. Everything we know about the growth of Michelangelo's
genius leads us to suppose that he departed gradually but surely from
the path of Nature. He came, however, to use what he had learned from
Nature as means for the expression of soul-stimulating thoughts. This,
the finest feature of his genius, no artist of the age was capable of
adequately comprehending. Accordingly, they agreed in extolling a
cartoon which displayed his faculty of dealing with _un bel corpo
ignudo_ as the climax of his powers.

As might be expected, there was no landscape in the Cartoon.
Michelangelo handled his subject wholly from the point of view of
sculpture. A broken bank and a retreating platform, a few rocks in the
distance and a few waved lines in the foreground, showed that the
naked men were by a river. Michelangelo's unrelenting contempt for the
many-formed and many-coloured stage on which we live and move--his
steady determination to treat men and women as nudities posed in the
void, with just enough of solid substance beneath the