and powerful, their attitudes spirited and graceful. Those in
the Last Judgment are huge and cumbersome, their attitudes strained
and violent. The entire effect of the vast company of colossal figures
is awe-inspiring, but not pleasing.

It is a relief to fix our eyes upon the central portion. Here the
painter expressed an idea at once noble and original. The figure of
the Christ has not the delicate beauty of the dead Christ in the
Pieta, or the finished elegance of the Christ Triumphant, but he has
the splendid vigor of a forceful character. The Mother, less grand and
noble than in the bereavement of the Pieta, less proud than in her
young motherhood, is a gentle and lovely creature. Thus the intensely
masculine is completed by the delicately feminine, and the artist
shows us ideal types of manhood and womanhood.

XVI

PORTRAIT

In the pictures of this collection we have learned something of the
work of Michelangelo as a sculptor and a painter. He was an artist
whose personality was so strongly impressed upon his work that we have
come thus to know, to a certain extent, the man himself. His, as we
have seen, was not a happy nature, and many of the circumstances of
his life conspired against his happiness.

In his early youth he seemed strangely aware of his own superior gifts
and was often so overbearing that he made enemies. The story is told
of a quarrel he had with a young man named Torrigiano, in whose
company he was copying some frescoes in a church in Florence. Stung by
some tormenting words of Michelangelo, Torrigiano retaliated with a
blow of the fist, which crushed his companion's nose, and disfigured
him for life.

Michelangelo's real education began in the palace of Lorenzo the
Magnificent, who discovered the lad's talent and made him a favorite.
"He sat at the same table with Ficino, Pico, and Poliziano, listening
to dialogues on Plato, and drinking in the golden poetry of Greece.
Greek literature and philosophy, expounded by the men who had
discovered them, first moulded his mind to those lofty thoughts which
it became the task of his life to express in form. At the same time he
heard the preaching of Savonarola. In the Duomo and the cloister of S.
Marco another portion of his soul was touched, and he acquired that
deep religious tone which gives its majesty and terror to the
Sistine."[37] In the gardens of S. Marco he had Lorenzo's fine
collection of antiquities to study, and learned from