chelangelo.

Fra Bartolommeo, who in temperament was delicate, refined, graceful, and
as a painter had a miniaturist's feeling for the dainty, was induced to
desert his lovely women, his exquisite landscape, and his gentleness of
expression for figures constructed mechanically on a colossal scale, or
for effects of the round at any cost. And as evil is more obvious than
good, Bartolommeo, the painter of that masterpiece of colour and light
and shade, of graceful movement and charming feeling, the "Madonna with
the Baptist and St. Stephen" in the Cathedral at Lucca, Bartolommeo, the
dainty deviser of Mr. Mond's tiny "Nativity," Bartolommeo, the artificer
of a hundred masterpieces of pen drawing, is almost unknown; and to most
people Fra Bartolommeo is a sort of synonym for pomposity. He is known
only as the author of physically colossal, spiritually insignificant
prophets and apostles, or, perchance, as the painter of pitch-dark
altar-pieces: this being the reward of devices to obtain mere relief.

[Page heading: ANDREA DEL SARTO]

Andrea del Sarto approached perhaps as closely to a Giorgione or a
Titian as could a Florentine, ill at ease in the neighbourhood of
Leonardo and Michelangelo. As an artist he was, it is true, not endowed
with the profoundest sense for the significant, yet within the sphere of
common humanity who has produced anything more genial than his "Portrait
of a Lady"--probably his wife--with a Petrarch in her hands? Where out
of Venetia can we find portraits so simple, so frank, and yet so
interpretive as his "Sculptor," or as his various portraits of
himself--these, by the way, an autobiography as complete as any in
existence, and tragic as few? Almost Venetian again is his "St. James"
caressing children, a work of the sweetest feeling. Even in colour
effect, and technique, how singularly close to the best Venetian
painting in his "Dispute about the Trinity"--what blacks and whites,
what greys and purplish browns! And in addition, tactile values peculiar
to Florence--what a back St. Sebastian's! But in a work of scarcely less
technical merit, the "Madonna of the Harpies," we already feel the man
not striving to get the utmost out of himself, but panting for the grand
and magnificent. Even here, he remains almost a great artist, because
his natural robustness comes to his rescue; but the "Madonna" is too
obviously statuesque, and, good saints, pray why all these draperies?

The obviously statuesque