ing a variety in the light
and shadow which is pictorial in effect.

[Footnote 1: See notes on the Life of Michelangelo Buonarotti in the
Blashfield-Hopkins edition of Vasari.]

To a man of Michelangelo's austere temperament, intensely masculine in
his predilections, the beauty of womanhood was not fully revealed. His
sibyls can scarcely be counted as women; they belong to a world of
their own, neither human nor divine. It was only in his few Madonnas
that we can trace his feminine ideal, an ideal noble and dignified,
rather than beautiful. The Madonna of the bas-relief is proud rather
than tender, the Virgin of the Pieta is grand rather than lovely.
These were works of his youth. Later in life, when he had known the
blessing of a good woman's friendship, he developed a new ideal in the
gentle and delicate womanhood of the Virgin of the Last Judgment.

Michelangelo has been compared to two great masters of dissimilar
arts, Milton and Beethoven. There are striking points of similarity
in the men themselves, in stern uprightness of character, in scorn of
the low and trivial, in lofty idealism. The art of all three is too
far above the common level to be popular; it requires too much
thinking to attract the superficial. In poetry, in music, and in
sculpture, all three utter the profoundest truths of human experience,
expressed in grand and solemn harmonies.

II. ON BOOKS OF REFERENCE.

The original materials for the study of Michelangelo's life and work
are the two biographies by his contemporaries, Vasari and Condivi.
Vasari's was the first of these (1550), and like the other portions of
his "Lives of the Painters" contained many inaccuracies. It was to
correct these that Condivi published his little book a few years
later. This rival effort aroused Vasari's wrath, and after
Michelangelo's death he issued an enlarged edition of his own book,
unscrupulously incorporating all that was valuable in Condivi's work,
and adding thereto many reminiscences of the master's life. The fame
of Vasari's monumental work caused Condivi's little book to be
entirely forgotten for long years, and it has been one of the tasks of
modern scholarship to restore it to its true place. Even now, however,
there is no available form of Condivi's biography for American
readers, though Vasari's "Lives" in Mrs. Foster's translation is found
in most libraries. The latest edition of Vasari, published in 1897,
contains annotations by Mr. and