And now he began to
feel the soothing influence which since that time the Roman Church has
often exerted over spirits too independent to be its subjects, yet
brought within the neighbourhood of its action; consoled and
tranquillised, as a traveller might be, resting for one evening in a
strange city, by its stately aspect, and the sentiment of its many
fortunes, just because with those fortunes he has nothing to do. So he
lingers on; a revenant, as the French say, a ghost out of another age,
in a world too coarse to touch his faint sensibilities too closely;
dreaming, in a worn-out society, theatrical in its life, theatrical in
its art, theatrical even in its devotion, on the morning of the world's
history, on the primitive form of man, on the images under which that
primitive world had conceived of spiritual forces.
I have dwelt on the thought of Michelangelo as thus lingering beyond his
time in a world not his own, because, if one is to distinguish the
peculiar savour of his work, he must be approached, not through his
followers, but through his predecessors; not through the marbles of
Saint Peter's, but through the work of the sculptors of the fifteenth
century over the tombs and altars of Tuscany.
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