230 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

and most straightforward way, regardless of artistical reputation, and desiring only to be read and understood. But Michael Angelo’s object was from the beginning that of an artist. He addresses not the sympathies of his day, but the understanding of all time, and he treats the subject in the mode best adapted to bring every one of his own powers into full play.¹ As might have been expected, while the self-forgetfulness of Orcagna has given, on the one hand, an awfulness to his work, and verity, which are wanting in the studied composition of the Sistine, on the other it has admitted a puerility commensurate with the narrowness of the religion he had to teach.

60. Greater differences still result from the opposed powers and idiosyncrasies of the two men. Orcagna was unable to draw the nude-on this inability followed a coldness to the value of flowing lines, and to the power of unity in composition-neither could he indicate motion or buoyancy in flying or floating figures, nor express violence of action in the limbs-he cannot even show the difference between pulling and pushing in the muscles of the arm. In M. Angelo these conditions were directly reversed. Intense sensibility to the majesty of writhing, flowing, and connected lines, was in him associated with a power, unequalled except by Angelico, of suggesting aërial motion-motion deliberate or disturbed, inherent or impressed, impotent or inspired-gathering into glory, or gravitating to death. Orcagna was therefore compelled to range his figures symmetrically in ordered lines, while Michael Angelo bound them into chains, or hurled them into heaps, or scattered them before him as the wind does leaves. Orcagna trusted for all his expression to the countenance, or to rudely explained gesture aided by grand fall of draperies, though in all these points he was still immeasurably inferior to his colossal rival. As for his “embracing the whole world of passions which make up the economy of man,” he had no such power of delineation-

¹ [With this comparison, compare the general statement in Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 123, pp. 145-147.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]