The boy with the doves, in Raphael's cartoon of the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, is not a child running, but a surgical diagram of a child in a running posture.
Farther, when the Greeks, Correggio, and Tintoret, draw the body active, it is because they rejoice in its force, and when they draw it inactive, it is because they rejoice in its repose. But Michael Angelo and Raphael invent for it ingenious mechanical motion, because they think it uninteresting when it is quiet, and cannot, in their pictures, endure any person's being simple-minded enough to stand upon both his legs at once, nor venture to imagine anyone's being clear enough in his language to make himself intelligible without pointing.
In all these conditions, the Greek and Venetian treatment of the body is faithful, modest, and natural; but Michael Angelo's dishonest, insolent, and artificial.
232. But between him and Tintoret there is a separation deeper than all these, when we examine their treatment of the face. Michael Angelo's vanity of surgical science rendered it impossible for him ever to treat the body as well as the Greeks treated it; but it left him wholly at liberty to treat the face as ill; and he did: and in some respects very curiously worse.
The Greeks had, in all their work, one type of face for beautiful and honorable persons; and another, much contrary to it, for dishonorable ones; and they were continually setting these in opposition. Their type of beauty lay chiefly in the undisturbed peace and simplicity of all contours; in full roundness of chin; in perfect formation of the lips, showing neither pride nor care; and, most of all, in a straight and firm line from the brow to the end of the nose.
The Greek type of dishonorable persons, especially satyrs, fauns, and sensual powers, consisted in irregular excrescence and decrement of features, especially in flatness of the upper part of the nose, and projection of the end of it into a blunt knob.
By the most grotesque fatality, as if the personal bodily injury he had himself received had passed with a sickly echo into his mind also, Michael Angelo is always dwelling on this satyric form of countenance;—sometimes violently caricatures it, but never can help drawing it; and all the best profiles in this collection at Oxford have what Mr. Robinson calls a "nez retroussé;" but what is, in reality, the nose of the Greek Bacchic mask, treated as a dignified feature.
233. For the sake of readers who cannot examine the drawings themselves, and lest I should be thought to have exaggerated in any wise the statement of this character, I quote Mr. Robinson's description of the head, No. 9—a celebrated and entirely authentic drawing, on which, I regret to say, my own pencil comment in passing is merely "brutal lower lip, and broken nose":—
"This admirable study was probably made from nature, additional character and more powerful expression having been given to it by a slight exaggeration of details, bordering on caricature (observe the protruding lower lip, 'nez retroussé,' and overhanging forehead). The head, in profile, turned to the right, is proudly planted on a massive neck and shoulders, and the short tufted hair stands up erect. The expression is that of fierce, insolent self-confidence and malevolence; it is engraved in facsimile in Ottley's 'Italian School of Design,' and it is described in that work, p. 33, as 'Finely expressive of scornfulness and pride, and evidently a study from nature.'
"Michel Angelo has made use of the same ferocious-looking model on other occasions—see an instance in the well-known 'Head of Satan' engraved in Woodburn's Lawrence Gallery (No. 16), and now in the Malcolm Collection.