Michelangelo was so entirely absorbed in his art, to the exclusion of every other thought or passion, that it is possible to trace in his works not only the gradual development of his genius, but also the vicissitudes of his long and stormy career. Of his youthful works only two, the bas-relief of the _Madonna and Child_ in the Buonarroti Collection and the _St. John_ in the Berlin Museum, bear evident traces of Donatello's influence; in the _Battle of the Centaurs_ and _Lapithae_ the young artist already asserts his powerful individuality, and the _Bacchus_ shows how thoroughly he had become imbued with the spirit of antique art. It was not until he carved the deeply religious group of the _Pietà_ that he revealed his spiritual personality, while in the _David_ we are first confronted with that _terribilita_ which is the most striking characteristic of his subsequent works. All Michelangelo's masterpieces, whether of sculpture or painting, are instinct with power and strength, like combatants in some fierce, mysterious battle; but whereas the youthful David appears to breathe forth a triumphant defiance, his later conceptions, such as the brooding athletes of the Sistine Chapel, the Louvre captives writhing in their bonds, the sombre giants of the Medicean tombs, and the terror-stricken figures of the _Last Judgment_, appear to be weighed down and overshadowed by the consciousness of inevitable doom. What was formerly a brave, fearless fight becomes a hopeless struggle of Titans against Fate. Sublimity of conception, grandeur of form, and breadth of manner are the elements of Michelangelo's style. As painter, as sculptor, as architect he attempted--and above any other man succeeded--to unite magnificence of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts with the utmost simplicity and breadth. His line is uniformly grand; character and beauty are admitted only as far as they can be made subservient to grandeur. The child, the female, even meanness and deformity, are by him indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rises from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generations; his infants teem with the man; his men are a race of giants. In that sublime circle of the Sistine Chapel which exhibits the origin, the progress and the final dispensations of theocracy, he may be regarded as the inventor of Epic painting.