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From those who have ambition to tread in this great walk of the Art, Michael Angelo claims the next attention. He did not possess so many excellencies as Raffaelle, but those which he had were of the highest kind. He considered the Art as consisting of little more than what may be attained by sculpture: correctness of form, and energy of character. We ought not to expect more than an artist intends in his work. He never attempted those lesser elegancies and graces in the Art. Vasari says, he never painted but one picture in oil, and resolved never to paint another, saying, it was an employment only fit for women and children.

If any man had a right to look down upon the lower accomplishments as beneath his attention, it was certainly Michael Angelo; nor can it be thought strange that such a mind should have slighted or have been withheld from paying due attention to all those graces and embellishments of art, which have diffused such lustre over the works of other painters.

It must be acknowledged, however, that together with these, which we wish he had more attended to, he has rejected all the false, though specious ornaments, which disgrace the works even of the most esteemed artists; and I will venture to say, that when those higher excellencies are more known and cultivated by the artists and patrons of arts, his fame and credit will increase with our increasing knowledge. His name will then be held in the same veneration as it was in the enlightened age of Leo the tenth and it is remarkable that the reputation of this truly great man has been continually declining as the art itself has declined. For I must remark to you, that it has long been much on the decline, and that our only hope of its revival will consist in your being thoroughly sensible of its deprivation and decay. It is to Michael Angelo, that we owe even the existence of Raffaelle: it is to him Raffaelle owes the grandeur of his style. He was taught by him to elevate his thoughts, and to conceive his

? Richardson, whose Theory of Painting first turned Reynolds's attention to the Art, after noticing the defects of Michael Angelo's mode of colouring, says, "After all, this great man deserved all the reputation that he had. 'Twas not wrong in the degree, but the application only. Others had tried to get out of the stiff, petit style of Painting, the remnant of Gothicism

subjects with dignity. His genius, however, formed to blaze and to shine, might, like fire in combustible matter, for ever have lain dormant, if it had not caught a spark by its contact with Michael Angelo; and though it never burst out with his extraordinary heat and vehemence, yet it must be acknowledged to be a more pure, regular, and chaste, flame. Though our judgement must upon the whole decide in favour of Raffaelle, yet he never takes such a firm hold and entire possession of the mind as to make us desire nothing else, and to feel nothing wanting. The effect of the capital works of Michael Angelo perfectly corresponds to what Bouchardon said he felt from reading Homer; his whole frame appeared to himself to be enlarged, and all nature which surrounded him, diminished to atoms.

If we put these great artists in a light of comparison with each other, Raffaelle had more Taste and Fancy; Michael Angelo more Genius and Imagination. The one excelled in beauty, the other in energy. Michael Angelo has more of the poetical Inspiration; his ideas are vast and sublime; his people are a superior order of beings; there is nothing about them, nothing in the air of their actions or their attitudes, or the style and cast of their limbs or features, that reminds us of their belonging to our own species. Raffaelle's imagination is not so elevated; his

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Michael Angelo broke through furiously, and, like a flash of lightning, dazzled the world with his great manner; no wonder he was then admired accordingly, he was the Luther of the Reformation of Painting. I am persuaded we owe our Raffaelle, such as he is, to this Michael Angelo he was capable of profiting by this vastness of style."-An Account of the Pictures in Italy, p. 273.

The precise time when Raffaelle altered and ennobled his style is variously stated by various writers. Vasari says, the Heliodorus, painted in 1512, the same year in which Michael Angelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, indicates that he had seen the work of Angelo; while the friends of Raffaelle maintain that he displayed the same grandeur in his prophet Isaiah, and the Sibyls in La Pace, which according to Bellori were finished before 1511; indeed, this peculiarity of style has given rise to one of the Sibyls being marked with Michael Angelo's name, in Bisscop's. Figures from the Great Masters. The Heliodorus certainly possesses this peculiar character, as also the Ananias and the Elymas, in his two Cartoons, which though difficult to explain by words, is strongly defined in the figure of Lazarus in the picture by Sebastian del Piombo in the National Gallery, undoubtedly from the design of Michael Angelo.

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figures are not so much disjoined from our own diminutive race of beings, though his ideas are chaste, noble, and of great conformity to their subjects. Michael Angelo's works have a strong, peculiar, and marked character: they seem to proceed from his own mind entirely, and that mind so rich and abundant, that he never needed, or seemed to disdain, to look abroad for foreign help. Raffaelle's materials are generally borrowed, though the noble structure is his own. The excellency of this extraordinary man lay in the propriety, beauty, and majesty of his characters, the judicious contrivance of his composition, his correctness of Drawing, purity of Taste, and skilful accommodation of other men's con

3 Many censure the attitudes and forms of the figures of Michael Angelo, without considering the class of beings called into existence by the peculiar turn of his genius: the personification of the Sibyls, those mysterious recorders of religious superstitions, whose oracles were revealed with the enthusiastic action of demons; the personification of the Prophets, rapt in ecstasy, or meditating on the hidden events in the womb of time, all these and their accessories require action and expression as far removed as possible from familiar life, so as to rouse the imagination of the spectator, and elevate his mind into the regions of awful sublimity. Richardson says, "The old Florentine School had a kind of greatness, that like Hercules in his cradle promised wonders to come, and which were accomplished in a great manner by Leonardi da Vinci, but more perfectly and fully by Michael Angelo; his style is his own, not antique: he had a greatness in the utmost degree, which sometimes runs into the extreme of terrible." However, with all his boldness and extravagance in design, we often find arrangements of the greatest simplicity and beauty, such as the Creation of Eve, &c., and forms possessing as much grace as Correggio, which neither Leonardi nor Signorelli give indications of. Addison, remarking upon what is properly a Great Genius, says, "Among Great Geniuses those few draw the admiration of the world upon them, and stand up as the prodigies of mankind, who by the mere strength of natural parts, and without any assistance of art or learning, have produced works that were the delight of their own times, and the wonder of posterity. There appears something nobly wild and extravagant in these great natural geniuses, that is infinitely more beautiful than all the turn and polishing of what the French call a bel esprit. There is another kind of Great Geniuses which I shall place in a second class, not as I think them inferior to the first, but only for distinction's sake, as they are of a different kind. This second class of Great Geniuses are those that have formed themselves by rules, and submitted the greatness of their natural talents to the corrections and restraints of Art. The great danger in the latter kind of Geniuses is, lest they cramp their own abilities too much by imitation, and form themselves altogether upon models without giving the full play to their own natural parts. An imitation of the best authors, is not to compare with a good original: and I believe we may observe that very few writers make an extraordinary figure in the world, who have not something in their way of thinking or expressing themselves, that is peculiar to them, and entirely their own."-Spectator, No. 160.

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