“Primitivism” in the Late Drawings of Michelangelo: The Master's Construction of an Old-age Style

In these forms the subjective and the conventional assume a new relationship, conditioned by death. … Where greatness and death come together … there anses an objectivity tending to the conventional, which, in its majesty leaves the most domineering subjectivity far behind because therein the merely personal —which had after all been the surmounting of a tradition already brought to its peak—once more outgrows itself, in that it enters into the mythical., the collectively great, and the supernatural.