Note *227 — Chapter LIV
Reading edition
No? Consider then the Pietà of S. Pietro in Vaticano, the unfinished Pietà of S. Maria del Fiore. All that Dennistoun says of Michelangelo is full of misunderstanding. For instance, he never "startles" though he may terrify one. It would be ridiculous to defend him. His work is beautiful, with the beauty of the mountains in which he alone has found the spirit of man. His figures, half unveiled from the living rock, are like some terrible indictment of the world he lived in: an indictment of himself too, perhaps, of his contempt for things as they are; it is in a sort of rage at its uselessness that he leaves them unfinished. In him the spirit of man has stammered the syllables of eternity, and in its agony of longing or sorrow has failed to speak only the word love. All things particular to the individual, all that is small or of little account, that endures but for a moment, he has purged away, so that life itself may make, as it were, an immortal gesticulation almost monstrous in its passionate intensity—a shadow seen on the mountains, a mirage on the snow.