The Last Day of Mme. Roland INTEREST in the notable characters and the leading events of that great epoch in modern history which we summarize under the name of the French Revolution has rather increased than lessened in the century which has passed. Its storms were too violent, its causes and its results too far-reaching, and its actors often too intensely human in their greatness and in their frailties, to be rightly judged by the immediate generations. Madame Roland, who perished by the guillotine in November, 1793, after an imprisonment of six months, during the Jacobin madness, when for a time the healing streams of revolutionary liberty had broken over all boundaries and become a destructive torrent, is a type of the high-minded, cultured and genial French women of the period, who, loving France, dreamed of a reign of liberty and justice, of order and well-being under a constitution and a regenerated kingship. Such sentiments and such cultured and moderate personalities as Mme. Roland were as hateful to the wild fanatics, who for the moment were in power in Paris, as any absolutist of the old régime. Her active connection with the administration just overthrown, her character and influence cost her the life which, with dignity and nobility of spirit, she freely gave to the better France which was later to be. Goupil was a pupil of H. Scheffer, the less famous brother of Ary Scheffer. He painted figure-pieces and portraits. This work, from the Salon of 1880, was for a time in the Luxemburg Gallery, and is the property of the state. Michelangelo (me'-kel-än'jē-lō), 1475-1564 INLY a small part of the splendid monument, which Julius II, made Pope in 1503, caused Michelangelo to design for him, was ever completed. It was planned to stand in the floor of the Tribune in the new church of St. Peter, but the piece of one side finally built was, in 1545, put on a wall of the far less important church of San Pietro in Vincoli. One of the magnificent statues originally designed for it was finished, however, and ennobles it, the Moses. As planned, colossal statues of Moses and Paul were to be installed, as symbols of the active and of the contemplative life. The St. Paul was never made, but in the Moses, the artist embodied all the force and depth of his mighty genius. Michelangelo, architect and great painter indeed, was preeminently and always a sculptor. The human body, which in its structure he had studied and knew as few ever have, was the medium through which, in terms of plastic form, his stern and rugged genius sought expression. Nature he knew and followed until he felt that normal proportions, contours and attitudes fell short of fully expressing the depth and force of his thought. Then he did not fear to go further, not so much against nature as beyond her, in massive figures with bulging muscles, giants of form in strange attitudes and difficult foreshortenings. The Moses is a mighty embodiment of strength and energy, for the moment in outward repose, repressing the storm of wrath and just indignation at the sinful weakness of his idolatrous race, and ready to overwhelm, as with the thunderbolts of a Jove, the guilty breakers of the law. |