A broken bank and a retreating platform, a few rocks in the distance and a few waved lines in the foreground, showed that the naked men were by a river.

Michelangelo's unrelenting contempt for the many-formed and many-coloured stage on which we live and move--his steady determination to treat men and women as nudities posed in the void, with just enough of solid substance beneath their feet to make their attitudes intelligible--is a point which must over and over again be insisted on.

In the psychology of the master, regarded from any side one likes to take, this constitutes his leading characteristic.

It gives the key, not only to his talent as an artist, but also to his temperament as a man.
Marcantonio seems to have felt and resented the aridity of composition, the isolation of plastic form, the tyranny of anatomical science, which even the most sympathetic of us feel in Michelangelo.
This master's engraving of three lovely nudes, the most charming memento preserved to us from the Cartoon, introduces a landscape of grove and farm, field and distant hill, lending suavity to the muscular male body and restoring it to its proper place among the sinuous lines and broken curves of Nature.

That the landscape was adapted from a copper-plate of Lucas van Leyden signifies nothing.