I recognise Michelangelo's sympathy with
genuine female quality. All the domestic groups, composed of women and
children, which fill the lunettes and groinings between the windows in
the Sistine Chapel, have a charming twilight sentiment of family life
or maternal affection. They are among the loveliest and most tranquil
of his conceptions. The Madonna above the tomb of Julius II. cannot be
accused of masculinity, nor the ecstatic figure of the Rachel beneath
it. Both of these statues represent what Goethe called "das ewig
Weibliche" under a truly felt and natural aspect. The Delphian and
Erythrean Sibyls are superb in their majesty. Again, in those numerous
designs for Crucifixions, Depositions from the Cross, and Pietas,
which occupied so much of Michelangelo's attention during his old age,
we find an intense and pathetic sympathy with the sorrows of Mary,
expressed with noble dignity and a pious sense of godhead in the human
mother. It will be remarked that throughout the cases I have reserved
as exceptions, it is not woman in her plastic beauty and her radiant
charm that Michelangelo has rendered, but woman in her tranquil or her
saddened and sorrow-stricken moods. What he did not comprehend and
could not represent was woman in her girlishness, her youthful joy,
her physical attractiveness, her magic of seduction.

Michelangelo's women suggest demonic primitive beings, composite and
undetermined products of the human race in evolution, before the
specific qualities of sex have been eliminated from a general
predominating mass of masculinity. At their best, they carry us into
the realm of Lucretian imagination. He could not have incarnated in
plastic form Shakespeare's Juliet and Imogen, Dante's Francesca da
Rimini, Tasso's Erminia and Clorinda; but he might have supplied a
superb illustration to the opening lines of the Lucretian epic, where
Mars lies in the bed of Venus, and the goddess spreads her ample limbs
above her Roman lover. He might have evoked images tallying the vision
of primal passion in the fourth book of that poem. As I have elsewhere
said, writing about Lucretius: "There is something almost tragic in
these sighs and pantings and pleasure-throes, these incomplete
fruitions of souls pent within their frames of flesh. We seem to see a
race of men and women such as never lived, except perhaps in Rome or
in the thought of Michelangelo, meeting in leonine embracements that
yield pain, whereof the climax i