causes, may have been miraculously wrought to convince the world of
the virginity and perpetual purity of the Mother. This was not
necessary for the Son. On the contrary, in order to prove that the Son
of God took upon himself, as in very truth he did take, a human body,
and became subject to all that an ordinary man is subject to, with the
exception of sin; the human nature of Christ, instead of being
superseded by the divine, was left to the operation of natural laws,
so that his person revealed the exact age to which he had attained.
You need not, therefore, marvel if, having regard to these
considerations, I made the most Holy Virgin, Mother of God, much
younger relatively to her Son than women of her years usually appear,
and left the Son such as his time of life demanded." "This reasoning,"
adds Condivi, "was worthy of some learned theologian, and would have
been little short of marvellous in most men, but not in him, whom God
and Nature fashioned, not merely to be peerless in his handiwork, but
also capable of the divinest concepts, as innumerable discourses and
writings which we have of his make clearly manifest."

The Christ is also somewhat youthful, and modelled with the utmost
delicacy; suggesting no lack of strength, but subordinating the idea
of physical power to that of a refined and spiritual nature. Nothing
can be more lovely than the hands, the feet, the arms, relaxed in
slumber. Death becomes immortally beautiful in that recumbent figure,
from which the insults of the scourge, the cross, the brutal lance
have been erased. Michelangelo did not seek to excite pity or to stir
devotion by having recourse to those mediaeval ideas which were so
passionately expressed in S. Bernard's hymn to the Crucified. The
aesthetic tone of his dead Christ is rather that of some sweet solemn
strain of cathedral music, some motive from a mass of Palestrina or a
Passion of Sebastian Bach. Almost involuntarily there rises to the