Suppose, then, that Michelangelo failed in his heads and faces, he, being an Italian, and therefore confessedly inferior to the Greeks in his bodies and limbs, must, by the force of logic, emerge less meritorious than we thought him.
VII To many of my readers the foregoing section will appear superfluous, polemical, sophistic--three bad things.

I wrote it, and I let it stand, however, because it serves as preface to what I have to say in general about Michelangelo's ideal of form.

He was essentially a Romantic as opposed to a Classic artist.

That is to say, he sought invariably for character--character in type, character in attitude, character in every action of each muscle, character in each extravagance of pose.

He applied the Romantic principle to the body and the limbs, exactly to that region of the human form which the Greeks had conquered as their province.