got rid of. The life that
sculpture can give is superficial and abstract, does not penetrate and
possess the work; it is still the petrifaction of an instant, that does
not instantly pass away, but remains as a contradiction to the next. It
is the struggle against this fixity that gives to the sculpture of the
Renaissance its aspect of unrest, of disdain of the present, of endless
unsatisfied search. Hence the air of conflict that we see in Giovanni
Pisano, and still more in later times,--the sculptor going to the edge
of what the stone will allow, and beyond it, and, still unsatisfied,
seeking through all means to indicate a yet unexecuted possibility. It
is this that seethes in those strange, intense, unearthly figures of
Donatello's, wasted as by internal fire,--the rage for an expression
that shall at the same time declare its own insufficiency.

All that is done only makes the failure more evident. The fixity
continues, and is only deepened into contortion and grimace. What we see
is the effort alone. Hence in modern statues the uneasy,
self-distrustful appeal to the spectator, in place of the lofty
indifference of the antique. In Michel Angelo the same striving to
indicate something in reserve, not expended, led to the exaggerated
emphasis of certain parts, (as the length of the neck, depth of the
eye-sockets, etc.,) and of general muscularity,--a show of _force_, that
gave to the Moses the build of a Titan, and to the Christ of the Last
Judgment the air of a gladiator. Michel Angelo often seems immersed in
mere anatomy and academic _tours de force_, especially in his later
works. He seems to see in the subject only a fresh problem in attitude,
foreshortening, muscular display,--and this not only where he invents,
but also where he borrows,--sometimes most strangely overlooking the
sentiment; as in the figure of Christ, which he borrows from Orcagna and
the older painters, even to the position of the arms, but with the
touching gesture of reproof perverted into a savage menace; or in the
Expulsion, taken almost line for line from Masaccio, but with the
infinite grief expressed in Adam's figure turned into melodrama by
showing his face.

It was not for the delight of the eye, nor from over-reverence of the
matter-of-fact. He despised the copying of models, as the makeshift of
ignorance. His profound study of anatomy was not for greater accuracy of
imitation, but for greater license of invention. Of grace and
plea