original as his Bacchus. Much as critics have written, and with
justice, upon the classical tendencies of the Italian Renaissance,
they have failed to point out that the Paganism of the Cinque Cento
rarely involved a servile imitation of the antique or a sympathetic
intelligence of its spirit. Least of all do we find either of these
qualities in Michelangelo. He drew inspiration from his own soul, and
he went straight to Nature for the means of expressing the conception
he had formed. Unlike the Greeks, he invariably preferred the
particular to the universal, the critical moment of an action to
suggestions of the possibilities of action. He carved an individual
being, not an abstraction or a generalisation of personality. The
Cupid supplies us with a splendid illustration of this criticism.
Being a product of his early energy, before he had formed a certain
manneristic way of seeing Nature and of reproducing what he saw, it
not only casts light upon the spontaneous working of his genius, but
it also shows how the young artist had already come to regard the
inmost passion of the soul. When quite an old man, rhyming those rough
platonic sonnets, he always spoke of love as masterful and awful. For
his austere and melancholy nature, Eros was no tender or light-winged
youngling, but a masculine tyrant, the tamer of male spirits.
Therefore this Cupid, adorable in the power and beauty of his vigorous
manhood, may well remain for us the myth or symbol of love as
Michelangelo imagined that emotion. In composition, the figure is from
all points of view admirable, presenting a series of nobly varied
line-harmonies. All we have to regret is that time, exposure to
weather, and vulgar outrage should have spoiled the surface of the
marble.


VI