After his journey Rodin decided that the strength of Michelangelo lay undoubtedly in his _movement_. Returning to his studio, he executed a quantity of sketches and even large figures like "The Creation of Man," the title of which, although he had not been to Rome, is a souvenir of the frescos of the Sistine Chapel; he made busts like that of Bellona, after having directed his models to assume Michelangelesque poses. For all this, he did not attain to the grandeur, the soul-disturbing authority of the Florentine master. Without becoming discouraged, he went on observing ceaselessly. Far from imposing upon his model positions thought out in advance, he left him free to wander about the studio at the pleasure of his own caprice, ready to arrest him at a word when a beautiful movement passed before his eyes. Then, six months after his return from Italy, he found that the model assumed of his own accord the very poses of which Michelangelo alone had seemed to him to possess the secret; he realized that the sublime sculptor had taken them direct from nature, from the rhythm of the human body in action, and that he had done nothing but seize and immortalize them. "Michelangelo," he says, "revealed me to myself, revealed to me the truth of forms. I went to Florence to find what I possessed in Paris and elsewhere, but it is he who taught me this." This does not prevent certain critics from asserting out of the depth of their incompetence that he has never felt the influence of this master and that he has never even given his work serious consideration. Those who know Rodin well know that, on the contrary, he never fails to give serious consideration to anything which is worth considering at all and that his power of observation is the basis of his genius. Always seeking a final method, he came back to the idea with which his earliest education had already inspired him and which his self-communings had only confirmed: that the value of sculpture lies entirely in the _modeling_. This is the secret of Michelangelo; it is also that of the ancients and of all the great artists of the past and of modern times. For the rest, through his spacious movements, his balancing of equal masses, the sculptor of the tombs taught him that the supreme quality consists in seeking in the modeling the _living, determining line of the scheme_, the supple axis of the human body. He himself held this principle of the ancients, of whom he was a disciple, as far as modeling is concerned, while in his composition and his handling of light he is a Gothic.