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.