3i8 MORE POT-POURRI 



mentioning the book here. Her reflections are youn^ 

 and genuine, and the courage with which she lays them 

 down gives them a human interest. I feel considerable 

 sympathy with what she says about Michael Angelo. 

 She thus speaks of the Medici statues : ' In a little 

 chapel in San Lorenzo are Michael Angelo's famous 

 statues — the Morning, the Noon, the Evening, and the 

 Night. I looked at them with admiration rather than 

 with pleasure ; for there is something in the severe and 

 overpowering style of this master which affects me dis- 

 agreeably, as beyond my feeling and above my 

 comprehension. These statues are very ill-disposed 

 for effect ; the confined cell (such it seems) in which 

 they are placed is so strangely disproportioned to the 

 awful and massive grandeur of their forms. 



' There is a picture by Michael Angelo, considered a 

 chef-d'cBuvre, which hangs in the Tribune to the right 

 of the Venus. Now, if all the connoisseurs, with Vasari 

 at their head, were to harangue for an hour together on 

 the merits of this picture, I might submit in silence, for 

 I am no connoisseur ; but that it is a disagreeable, a 

 hateful picture, is an opinion which fire could not melt 

 out of me. In spite of Messieurs les Connoisseurs and 

 Michael Angelo's fame, I would die in it at the stake. 

 For instance, here is the Blessed Virgin — not the 

 "Vergine Santa d'ogni grazia plena," but a Virgin 

 whose brickdust- coloured face, harsh, unfeminine 

 features, and muscular, masculine arms give me the idea 

 of a washerwoman (con rispetto parlando!) — an infant 

 Saviour with the proportions of a giant ! And what 

 shall we say of the nudity of the figures in the back- 

 ground? — profaning the subject and shocking at once 

 good taste and good sense. A little further on the eye 

 rests on the divine Madre di Dio of Correggio. What 

 beauty, what sweetness, what maternal love and humble 



