least as
much sense of movement and power of rendering it,--Leonardo, for
example; but no other artist of modern times, having at all his control
over the materially significant, has employed it as Michelangelo did, on
the one subject where its full value can be manifested--the nude. Hence
of all the achievements of modern art, his are the most invigorating.
Surely not often is our imagination of touch roused as by his Adam in
the "Creation," by his Eve in the "Temptation," or by his many nudes in
the same ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel,--there for no other purpose, be
it noted, than their direct tonic effect! Nor is it less rare to quaff
such draughts of unadulterated energy as we receive from the "God
Creating Adam," the "Boy Angel" standing by Isaiah, or--to choose one or
two instances from his drawings (in their own kind the greatest in
existence)--the "Gods Shooting at a Mark" or the "Hercules and the
Lion."

And to this feeling for the materially significant and all this power of
conveying it, to all this more narrowly artistic capacity, Michelangelo
joined an ideal of beauty and force, a vision of a glorious but possible
humanity, which, again, has never had its like in modern times.
Manliness, robustness, effectiveness, the fulfilment of our dream of a
great soul inhabiting a beautiful body, we shall encounter nowhere else
so frequently as among the figures in the Sixtine Chapel. Michelangelo
completed what Masaccio had begun, the creation of the type of man best
fitted to subdue and control the earth, and, who knows! perhaps more
than the earth.

[Page heading: LAST WORKS OF MICHELANGELO]

But unfortunately, though born and nurtured in a world where his
feeling for the nude and his ideal of humanity could be appreciated, he
passed most of his life in the midst of tragic disasters, and while yet
in the fulness of his vigour, in the midst of his most creative years,
he found himself alone, perhaps the greatest, but alas! also the last of
the giants born so plentifully during the fifteenth century. He lived on
in a world he could not but despise, in a world which really could no
more employ him than it could understand him. He was not allowed,
therefore, to busy himself where he felt most drawn by his genius, and,
much against his own strongest impulses, he was obliged to expend his
energy upon such subjects as the "Last Judgment." His later works all
show signs of the altered conditions, first in an overflow in