Parrhasius believed in representing only "the perspective, the light and the shadow, the softness, hardness and surface of bodies." Socrates taught him that the object of painting is to represent the soul and the innermost being.[133] "The fields and trees can teach me nothing," he says in the "Phædo"; "I only find what is useful to me among men in the towns." These very men only interested him because there was something eternal in them. The fugitive and changing side of their physiognomy, which for us makes the delicate charm of life and the object of painting, seemed to him an empty and wearisome illusion. Art creates illusions. The objects which it represents are "the dreams of the human imagination offered to people who can see. It is an image which one shows in the distance to little children who can not reason, in order to create illusions for them. These illusions of the senses distract the soul from the only realities, eternal ideas."
Michelangelo reasoned thus in his disdain of all exact reproduction of nature. He had studied it with passion but, in order to discover its laws, he regarded it as an enemy which held the human spirit prisoner. He wanted to free himself from it, he wanted to make of it an instrument for his thought. That is why he sought for and discovered its machinery, and when he could guide it at will he outraged it; he made it produce unprecedented results. He constructed for himself out of his profound knowledge of anatomy a general idea of man, and thereafter, without having recourse to any observation of individuals, he recreated the whole of nature in the image of his ideas and in the likeness of God, source and originator of ideas.
Come dal foco 'l cald' 'esser' diviso Nom puo 'l bel dall' eterno; e la mia stima Esalta che ne scende, e chi 'l somiglia.
"As heat can not be separated from fire, so beauty can not be from eternity; and my thought extols what comes from it and what resembles it."
Detail from The Last Judgment (1536-1541). Sistine Chapel.]
He wanted to express in his work only what was eternal, and he did not believe he could do this with external objects. He tried, therefore, to give to everything he did a character of compelling force. His Platonic idealism was lined with Christian pessimism. Like Vittoria Colonna, he was filled with the sense of the beauty of all human things, and he was obsessed with the idea of death.