anity of Canova's
garland grace, and ball-room sentiment with the intense truth,
tenderness, and power of men like Mino da Fiesole, whose chisel leaves
many a hard edge, and despises down and dimple, but it seems to cut
light and carve breath, the marble burns beneath it, and becomes
transparent with very spirit. Yet Mino stopped at the human nature; he
saw the soul, but not the ghostly presences about it; it was reserved
for Michael Angelo to pierce deeper yet, and to see the indwelling
angels. No man's soul is alone: Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it by
the heart or the angel by the hand, the light or the fear of the
spiritual things that move beside it may be seen on the body; and that
bodily form with Buonaroti, white, solid, distinct material, though it
be, is invariably felt as the instrument or the habitation of some
infinite, invisible power. The earth of the Sistine Adam that begins to
burn; the woman embodied burst of adoration from his sleep; the twelve
great torrents of the Spirit of God that pause above us there, urned in
their vessels of clay; the waiting in the shadow of futurity of those
through whom the promise and presence of God went down from the Eve to
the Mary, each still and fixed, fixed in his expectation, silent,
foreseeing, faithful, seated each on his stony throne, the building
stones of the word of God, building on and on, tier by tier, to the
Refused one, the head of the corner; not only these, not only the troops
of terror torn up from the earth by the four quartered winds of the
Judgment, but every fragment and atom of stone that he ever touched
became instantly inhabited by what makes the hair stand up and the words
be few; the St. Matthew, not yet disengaged from his sepulchre, bound
hand and foot by his grave clothes, it is left for us to loose him; the
strange spectral wreath of the Florence Pieta, casting its pyramidal,
distorted shadow, full of pain and death, among the faint purple lights
that cross and perish under the obscure dome of St^a. Maria del Fiore,
the white lassitude of joyous limbs, panther like, yet passive, fainting
with their own delight, that gleam among the Pagan formalisms of the
Uffizii, far away, showing themselves in their lustrous lightness as the
waves of an Alpine torrent do by their dancing among the dead stones,
though the stones be as white as they:[66] and finally, and perhaps more
than all, those four ineffable types, not of darkness nor of day--not of