r shoulder from the arms
of Joseph. Never in any painting have the drawing and modelling of the
human figure been so perfectly executed as in the figure of this Child and
the arms of the Madonna; the hands and feet are modelled with the delicacy
of a Flemish miniature, and at the same time have a beauty and suavity of
modelling and a magnificent choice of line altogether Italian. On either
side of the central triangle the spaces between it and the circumference
of the tondo are filled by the introduction of the infant St. John and
some nude shepherds; the landscape background is austere as the mountain
tops of some primeval world where such titanic beings as these of Michael
Angelo's alone could dwell. The old painters loved to decorate their
Madonna pictures with all the most beautiful things they could think of,
or most loved. The Florentines with fair and pleasant gardens; the
Umbrians with spacious colonnades, distant landscapes, and rare skies; the
Venetians with fruits and garlands of foliage and fruit, and even
vegetables, if they had a particular regard for them, as Crivelli had for
the cucumber. One painter only before this time decorated his pictures
with nude human figures, Luca Signorelli. Michael Angelo may have seen a
Madonna of his, with two nude figures in the background, executed for
Lorenzo de' Medici, and now hung in the Gallery of the Uffizi. Michael
Angelo, who knew the beauty of the human form better than any one, would
never be content to decorate his tondo with any less beautiful offering
after seeing this picture by Signorelli. The tondo form was a favourite
one with Signorelli. His two pictures of this shape in Florence perhaps
helped Michael Angelo in the three compositions we have been considering;
and this is the only debt Michael Angelo owes to the Umbrian painter.
Their way of looking at the nude and their ideals of its beauty are so
absolutely different, the one from the other, that possibly the Florentine
could hardly bear to look at the work of the Umbrian.

[Image #10]

THE CARTOON OF PISA

FROM THE MONOCHROME AT HOLKHAM HALL
(_By permission of the Earl of Leicester_)

In August 1504, Michael Angelo was commissioned to prepare cartoons for
the decoration of a wall in the Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo
Vecchio, opposite the wall for which Leonardo da Vinci was already
preparing