For him a figure existed only in his particular representation of it; how it would have looked in any other position was a matter of no concern to him." We may even go further, and maintain that Michelangelo was sometimes wilfully indifferent to the physical capacities of the human body in his passionate research of attitudes which present picturesque and novel beauty.

The ancients worked on quite a different method.
They created standard types which, in every conceivable posture, would exhibit the grace and symmetry belonging to well-proportioned frames.
Michelangelo looked to the effect of a particular posture.

He may have been seduced by his habit of modelling figures in clay instead of going invariably to the living subject, and so may have handled nature with unwarrantable freedom.

Anyhow, we have here another demonstration of his romanticism.
VIII The true test of the highest art is that it should rightly represent the human form.

Agreed upon this point, it remains for us to consider in what way Michelangelo conceived and represented the human form.