still continued seeking something more," his biographer says of him; "and instead of making his figures of baked earth simply white, he added the further invention of giving them colour, to the astonishment and delight of all who beheld them"--Cosa singolare, e multo utile per la state!--a curious thing, and very useful for summer-time, full of coolness and repose for hand and eye. Luca loved the form of various fruits, and wrought them into all sorts of marvellous frames and garlands, giving them their natural colours, only subdued a little, a little paler than nature. I said that the art of Luca della Robbia possessed in an unusual measure that special characteristic which belongs to all the work- men of his school, a characteristic which, even in the absence of much positive information about their actual history, seems to bring those work-men themselves very near to us. They bear the impress of a personal quality, a profound+ expressiveness, what the French call intimité, by which is meant some subtler sense of originality--the seal on a man's work of what is most inward and peculiar in his moods, and manner of apprehension: it is what we call expression, carried to its highest intensity of degree. That characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer still [72] in art, rarest of all in the abstract art of sculpture; yet essentially, perhaps, it is the quality which alone makes work in the imaginative order really worth having at all. It is because the works of the artists of the fifteenth century possess this quality in an unmistakable way that one is anxious to know all that can be known about them and explain to one's self the secret of their charm. 1872. NOTES 71. +The Macmillan edition's misprint "profund" is here corrected to "profound," the spelling of the 1901 edition. THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO [73] CRITICS of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken as if the only characteristic of his genius were a wonderful strength, verging, as in the things of the imagination great strength always does, on what is singular or strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall give pleasure and exert a charm over us is indispensable too; and this strangeness must be sweet also--a lovely strangeness. And to the true admirers of Michelangelo this is the true type of the Michelangelesque-- sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, an energy of conception which seems at every moment about to break through all the conditions of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, a loveliness found usually only in the simplest natural things--ex forti dulcedo.