Sculpture

(Based on Symonds' Life of Michelangelo Buonarotti, to which the accompanying notes on pages refer.)

The pictures we have thus far studied in this collection are reproductions of works of sculpture. This is the art which Michelangelo loved best. He was, however, a painter also, and in the later years of his life he was even drawn into architecture. Painting was the first art he studied, but he soon laid it aside for sculpture, and after that returned to it from time to time throughout his life.

In the busy years of Christ's ministry we do not read of his often being with his mother Mary. He was going about the country preaching and healing, and gave himself wholly to his mission. Yet we know that the love between mother and son was constant and unchanging. From beginning to end she always had confidence in his power, and his tender care for her was among his last thoughts.

Pietro Bembo, 1470-1547, made cardinal in 1539, master of Latin style and also writer in Italian.

Jacopo Sadoleto, 1477-1547, made cardinal in 1536, writer of Latin verses, moral treatises, and commentary on Romans.

Egidio Canisio, 1470-1532, made cardinal in 1457, Latin orator and writer on philosophy, history, and theology.

Paolo Giovio, 1483-1552, bishop of Nocera 1528, historian and biographer.

Baldassare Castiglione, 1478-1529, diplomatist and scholar.

(Cristo Risorto)

Science has long been trying to solve the problem of the origin of the human race. Great books are published by learned men to explain how the being called man came to be what he is. But centuries before the beginnings of science a wonderful poem was written on the same subject of the creation. This poem is called Genesis, that is, the Birth or Origin of things, and it forms a part of the first book of our Bible. Ever since it was written it has been one of the sacred books of many people.

With Greuze and Chardin we are supposed to get into so different a sphere of thought and feeling that the change has been called a "return to nature"—that "return to nature" of which we hear so much in histories of literature as well as of the plastic arts. The notion is not quite sound. Chardin is a painter who seems to me, at least, to stand quite apart, quite alone, in the development of French painting, whereas there could not be a more marked instance of the inherence of the classic spirit in the French æsthetic nature than is furnished by Greuze.

Whatever the painting of the future is to be, it is certain not to be the painting of Monet. For the present, no doubt, Monet is the last word in painting. To belittle him is not only whimsical, but ridiculous. He has plainly worked a revolution in his art. He has taken it out of the vicious circle of conformity to, departure from, and return to abstractions and the so-called ideal.