In the long row of Michelangelo's creations, those young men are perhaps the most significant--athletic adolescents, with faces of feminine delicacy and poignant fascination.

But it serves no purpose to inquire what they symbolise.

If we did so, we should have to go further, and ask, What do the bronze figures below them, twisted into the boldest attitudes the human frame can take, or the twinned children on the pedestals, signify?
In this region, the region of pure plastic play, when art drops the wand of the interpreter and allows physical beauty to be a law unto itself, Michelangelo demonstrated that no decorative element in the hand of a really supreme master is equal to the nude.
Previous artists, with a strong instinct for plastic as opposed to merely picturesque effect, had worked upon the same line.

Donatello revelled in the rhythmic dance and stationary grace of children.

Luca Signorelli initiated the plan of treating complex ornament by means of the mere human body; and for this reason, in order to define the position of Michelangelo in Italian art-history, I shall devote the next section of this chapter to Luca's work at Orvieto.