Doubtless Michelangelo, moving to sketch the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or the last panel of it, is carrying in himself the experience, the artistic experience of eighteen centuries. Yet he must have forgotten it all, at least as objective knowledge, to find it in himself flesh of his flesh, marrow of his bones, soul of his soul; so that he could move freely as an artist, in all the spontaneity and, therefore, liberty of creation. The character of his work is personal, so highly personal that it includes all the determinations which single out Buonarroti as a man of that land, of that religion and even of that particular moment of his religion, of that time, of such and such temperament and inclination, and singles out the whole of his production as belonging to that particular moment of the Italian Renaissance. The greater is the artist’s personality, the better he discharges his twofold function of microcosm and macrocosm of his world. It is an illusion of the nineteenth century to believe that personality in art makes for atomistic individualism. Just as it is an absurd error of the people who judge Mussolini and Fascism to believe that they have grown without roots. They would then be superposed to history, superfluous, unnecessary; whereas the great artist and the great politician belong to life, and in fact are historical life working itself out to expression or political realisation. The _Storia della letteratura Italiana_, like an immense relief, unfurls the development of the life of Mind in Italy from the dawn of the Italian mentality right up to the days of the critic. For de Sanctis, Art is Mind individualising itself through the senses in the transparency of intuition; Art in other words, is life reaching the luminosity of form. This blending, this perfectly intimate welding of reason and sense, of universal and particular is Art. It is, therefore, individuality, not individuality taken as it is too often—as the contrary of universality, but as its realisation in the particular. For this relation of the universal and particular is constitutive of art, which is, therefore, neither individual arbitrariness, nor the mere reflection of life in the artist’s fancy, but life itself coming through its own development to intuitive transparency. Life cannot be a matter of which art would be the form; and religion, politics, science as elements of life are not alien to art or indifferent to it. None of this element can exist without art, and history leaves no doubt on the point—each new religion, new political system, new scientific progress is not to be parted from the artistic production of the time.