Michelangelo

Excerpt from Michelangelo

There are artists whose achievement is so great that progress in the arts seems to stop with their efforts. Smaller men found schools, lead art forward, open up new avenues; great men fulfil the promise of their age and stand at the very culmination of a tendency. Imitation of their supreme performances becomes futile; yet departure from their methods seems impossible in face of their success. So Shakespeare, so Beethoven, so Michelangelo.

In sculpture, at least, Michelangelo stands so preeminent that the art which had begun its emancipation from medieval crudity with thirteenth century Niccolo Pisano and climbed through tho work of such men as Orcagno and Jacopo of Siena to that of Ghiberti, Donatello and Verrocchio, paused for centuries at the point to which the creator of the David, the Moses and the tomb of Lorenzo carried it. Only when Rodin, almost in our own day, working as a modeller rather than as a sculptor, turned the art towards impressionism in his later work; when Mestrovitch reverted to Assyrian and Egyptian models; when the demand for expressionistic art rather than truth to nature sent some of the sculptors to primitive savage art, others to abstract form; and many to a purely decorative treatment of the facts of nature; only then did plastic art escape his domination. He remains for us still the sculptor whose works can stand alongside the best masterpieces of antiquity, and whoso faithfulness alike to nature and to an ideal conception of form never falters throughout the great series of his works.

Alongside this performance as a sculptor stand his equal one as a painter and draughtsman. Indeed, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel are for many his supreme achievement.

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