Sublimity of conception, grandeur of form, and breadth of manner are the
elements of Michael Angelo's style.[34] By these principles he selected
or rejected the objects of imitation. 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 were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient
to grandeur. The child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him
indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the
patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity;
his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man; his
men are a race of giants. This is the 'terribil via' hinted at by
Agostino Carracci, though perhaps as little understood by the Bolognese
as by the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. To
give the appearance of perfect ease to the most perplexing difficulty,
was the exclusive power of Michael Angelo. He is the inventor of epic
painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine chapel which exhibits
the origin, the progress, and the final dispensations of theocracy. He
has personified motion in the groups of the cartoon of Pisa; embodied
sentiment on the monuments of St. Lorenzo, unravelled the features of
meditation in the Prophets and Sibyls of the Sistine chapel; and in the
Last Judgement, with every attitude that varies the human body, traced
the master-trait of every passion that sways the human heart. Though as
sculptor, he expressed the character of flesh more perfectly than all
who went before or came after him, yet he never submitted to copy an
individual; Julio the second only excepted, and in him he represented
the reigning passion rather than the man.[35] In painting he contented
himself with a negative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected
all meretricious ornament.[36] The fabric of St. Peter, scattered into
infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he
concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex gave the air
of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him all in all, was M.
Angelo, the salt of art: sometimes he no doubt had his moments of
dereliction, deviated into manner, or perplexed the grandeur of his
forms with futile and ostentatious anatomy: both met with armies of
copyists; and it has been his fate to have been censured for their
folly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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