ried--Here the hallow'd visage saves not: here
Is other swimming than in Serchio's wave,
Wherefore, if thou desire we rend thee not,
Take heed thou mount not o'er the pitch. This said,
They grappled him with more than hundred hooks,
And shouted--Cover'd thou must sport thee here;
So, if thou canst, in secret mayst thou filch."
CARY'S _Dante_, c. xxi.

Fraught as his imagination was with gloomy ideas, with images of
horror, it is the fidelity of his descriptions, the minute reality of
his pictures, which gives them their terrible power. He knew well what
it is that penetrates the soul. His images of horror in the infernal
regions were all founded on those familiar to every one in the upper
world; it was from the caldron of boiling pitch in the arsenal of
Venice that he took his idea of one of the pits of Malebolge. But what
a picture does he there exhibit! The writhing sinner plunged headlong
into the boiling waves, rising to the surface, and a hundred demons,
mocking his sufferings, and with outstretched hooks tearing his flesh
till he dived again beneath the liquid fire! It is the reality of the
scene, the images familiar yet magnified in horror, which constitutes
its power: we stand by; our flesh creeps as it would at witnessing an
_auto-da-fe_ of Castile, or on beholding a victim perishing under the
knout in Russia.

Michael Angelo was, in one sense, the painter of the Old Testament, as
his bold and aspiring genius arrived rather at delineating the events
of warfare, passion, or suffering, chronicled in the records of the
Jews, than the scenes of love, affection, and benevolence, depicted in
the gospels. But his mind was not formed merely on the events
recorded in antiquity: it is no world doubtful of the immortality of
the soul which he depicts. He is rather the personification in
painting of the soul of Dante. His imagination was evidently fraught
with the conceptions of the _Inferno_. The expression of mind beams
forth in all his works. Vehement passion, stern resolve, undaunted
valour, sainted devotion, infant innocence, alternately occupied his
pencil. It is hard to say in which he was greatest. In all his works
we see marks of the genius of antiquity meeting the might of modern
times: the imagery of mythology blended with the aspirations of
Christianity. We see it in the dome of St Peter's, we see it in the
statue of Moses. Grecian sculpture was the realizati