In the history of Art, Michelangelo stands isolated, a colossal figure looming terrible and majestic, a Titan towering far above the sons of men. Yet his was an age of giants. When Michelangelo came before the world the glorious tide of the Renaissance was still rising; sculpture and architecture had been brought to an unprecedented degree of excellence by such men as Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello and Brunelleschi, and following in Masaccio's footsteps, a host of great painters had successfully striven to renovate and perfect their art until it culminated in a Raphael. Leonardo da Vinci was already famous before Michelangelo had touched chisel or brush, but neither Leonardo's encyclopaedic achievements nor Raphael's meteorlike career can be regarded as the ultimate expression, the high-water mark of the Italian Renaissance. In Michelangelo we behold the giant embodiment of the true spirit of that wonderful period, the synthesis of its various forms of beauty and perfection, the final manifestation of its aesthetic possibilities. When Art first shook off the trammels of mediaevalism, she was content to worship at the shrine of Truth; with Botticelli and Leonardo she passed into vague regions of poetry. Raphael touched a more human note, often soaring to sublime harmonies: with Michelangelo the Renaissance reached its fullest development, attaining to a spiritual height, an almost superhuman loftiness hitherto undreamt of. Other men had excelled in painting, in sculpture, or in architecture before him, but Michelangelo was the first to attain perfection in every branch of Art, and such was his strong creative individuality that he left nothing to which he applied himself at the same stage where he had found it, bringing every manifestation of Art to the highest degree of perfection of which it was capable, and crowning all with that glorious aureola of spiritual grandeur which is the most awe-inspiring characteristic of his works. We have said that Michelangelo stands alone. Of other artists it is easy to trace the aesthetic derivation, but he is the product of no school, the result of no external influence. Michelangelo, the most perfect emanation of the Renaissance, came before an astonished world like Minerva leaping from the head of Jove, all armed and beautiful in her strength and wisdom.