For while
Sculpture, like gravitation, acts toward one point, it is permitted to
Painting, as to light, to fill all space with its creative energy.
This unlimited universality of Painting is demonstrated by History
itself, and by the examples of the greatest masters, who, without
injury to the essential character of their art, have developed to
perfection each particular stage by itself, so that we can find also
in the history of Art the same sequence that may be pointed out in its
nature--not indeed in exact order of time, but yet substantially. For
thus is represented in Michelangelo the oldest and mightiest epoch of
liberated Art, that in which it displays its yet uncontrolled strength
in gigantic progeny; as in the fables of the symbolic Fore-world, the
Earth, after the embrace of Uranus, brought forth at first Titans and
heaven-storming giants before the mild reign of the serene gods began.
Thus the painting of the Last Judgment, with which, as the sum of his
art, that giant spirit filled the Sistine Chapel, seems to remind
us more of the first ages of the Earth and its products, than of
its last. Attracted toward the most hidden abysses of organic,
particularly of the human form, he shuns not the Terrible; nay,
he seeks it purposely, and startles it from its repose in the dark
workshops of Nature. Want of delicacy, grace, pleasingness, he
balances by the extremest energy; and if he excites horror by his
representations, it is the terror that, according to fable, the
ancient god Pan spreads around him when he suddenly appears in the
assemblies of men.
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