e Morning, the Noon, the Evening, and the Night. I looked
at them with admiration rather than with pleasure; for there is
something in the severe and overpowering style of this master, which
affects me disagreeably, as beyond my feeling, and above my
comprehension. These statues are very ill disposed for effect: the
confined _cell_ (such it seemed) in which they are placed is so
strangely disproportioned to the awful and massive grandeur of their
forms.

There is a picture by Michel Angelo, considered a chef-d'oeuvre,
which hangs in the Tribune, to the right of the Venus: now if all the
connaisseurs in the world, with Vasari at their head, were to harangue
for an hour together on the merits of this picture, I might submit in
silence, for I am no connoisseur; but that it is a disagreeable, a
hateful picture, is an opinion which fire could not melt out of me. In
spite of Messieurs les Connaisseurs, and Michel Angelo's fame, I would
die in it at the stake: for instance, here is the Blessed Virgin, not
the "Vergine Santa, d'ogni grazia piena," but a Virgin, whose
brick-dust coloured face, harsh unfeminine features, and muscular,
masculine arms, give me the idea of a washerwoman, (con rispetto
parlando!) an infant Saviour with the proportions of a giant: and what
shall we say of the nudity of the figures in the back-ground;
profaning the subject and shocking at once good taste and good sense?
A little farther on, the eye rests on the divine Madre di Dio of
Correggio: what beauty, what sweetness, what maternal love, and humble
adoration are blended in the look and attitude with which she bends
over her infant! Beyond it hangs the Madonna del Cardellino of
Raffaelle: what heavenly grace, what simplicity, what saint-like
purity, in the expression of that face, and that exquisite mouth! And
from these must I turn back, on pain of being thought an ignoramus, to
admire the coarse perpetration of Michel Angelo--because it is Michel
Angelo's? But I speak in ignorance.[F]

To return to San Lorenzo. The chapel of the Medici, begun by Ferdinand
the First, where coarse brickwork and plaster mingle with marble and
gems, is still unfinished and likely to remain so: it did not interest
me. The fine bronze sarcophagus, which encloses the ashes of Lorenzo
the Magnificent, and of his brother Giuliano, assassinated by the
Pazzi, interested me far more. While I was standing carelessly in
front of the high altar, I happened to look down, and u