In 1508 Raphael was called to Rome through the influence of a former Urbino friend, Bramante, now the architect of new St. Peter’s. The task set by Pope Julius II was the decoration of the four new antechambers called the Stanze. About the same time Michelangelo began on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Thus the two artists worked within two hundred feet of each other, but held apart partly by a natural rivalry, and even more by the irascible and suspicious nature of Michelangelo. And two masterpieces were produced as from two different worlds—Michelangelo’s all tragic and perturbed, Raphael’s all hopeful and serene. Between 1509 and 1511 Raphael frescoes the Camera della Segnatura, mostly with his own hand. The scheme comprised the finest leading ideals of contemporary humanism, and the little room is the most important of documents for the student of the Renaissance. Religious authority, legal justice, secular philosophy and science, the arts—such are the four great themes impersonated on the side walls, and echoed in symbol and human illustration on the beautiful ceiling; these are the props of a perfect society.

Religious authority and theology are represented by the famous fresco called erroneously the Dispute concerning the Sacrament, Figure 187. Christ, as the fully revealed member of the Trinity, sits in a heaven rayed and studded with gold; beside him sit the prophets and apostles—the actual witnesses of his passion. The seated group sweeps grandly back describing a sort of semi-dome in space. Below and precisely in the centre, on an altar, glitters the wafer which in the recurrent miracle of the Mass becomes Christ’s body. To right and left of the altar are closely compacted and agitated groups insisting on the truth of the miracle of transubstantiation. These are the martyrs and church doctors, those who after the apostolic age either in experience or divine intuition certified to the central mystery of the Church. The upper group is composed after the fashion of Fra Bartolommeo and Perugino, is a mere expansion of Raphael’s fresco at San Severo; the lower group is held together after the fashion of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, the vehemence of the particular gestures being assimilated in a running balance of thrust against thrust, so that the whole effect is of a rich and energetic harmony. The figures themselves are established adequately, but in draughtsmanship are inferior either to Leonardo’s or Michelangelo’s. With the thriftiness of a born decorator, Raphael makes the figure count in its place and beyond that takes no unnecessary pains. It might indeed be argued that the decoration would be worse as a whole if the parts were more perfect. Finally, note how essentially classical, Roman, juridical the motive is; how concrete and material. Raphael seeks to express nothing more mystical than the obvious equation of Christ and the host, and he merely cites a multitude of witnesses to prove that the equation is true. This very simplicity of motive has thoroughly humanized what might have been a tenuous theme. The picture is a magnificent conclave out of many ages, a symbol of the cumulative splendor of the Catholic tradition.

On the opposite wall, in the School of Athens, Figure 188, Raphael pictures a similar continuity of human thought on the secular plane. The arched space opens into a vast basilica whose gods, represented as colossal statues at the sides, are Apollo and Minerva. Raphael has studied the Basilica of Constantine and has modestly scanned Bramante’s plans for new St. Peter’s. He invents a vaulted interior more impressive than any that man has ever built. Within finite bounds he suggests the infinity of Umbrian space. Without the figures, or with quite other figures, we should still have a great picture. But the group is as nobly disposed as the architecture. You may imagine a foreshortened ring of which the reverend forms of Plato and Aristotle are the twin jewels. Aristotle at the right is in the vigor of middle age as a scientist should be. His disciples crowd towards him or gather in secondary groups about some leader. Science is social and co-operative. Raphael puts himself in this group. Plato at the left is immensely old and feeble. Speculative philosophy requires only strength of spirit. His disciples are generally isolated in personal meditation. Philosophical truth is arrived at not in society but in solitude. Certain ardent young faces recall Leonardo da Vinci, and the construction of the group is his. We have linking motives, like that of sprawling Diogenes on the steps, curves that repeat or counter the vault above, turns and thrusts of bodies in active balance, an energetic variety within a serene harmony. The mood is less agitated than that of the Disputa, while the composition is freer. Human science and philosophy are at once less bound than is theology, and move more equably because they strive for more readily attainable ends. Like its companion piece, the School of Athens is both a citation of witnesses and a profession of faith, of faith in the capacity of the human mind.

The fresco of Parnassus repeats approximately the grouping of the School of Athens, but changes the mood to one of lyrism, and shifts the scene to a hill top. About Apollo and the Muses wander the forms of the elder and recent poets. Often the faces are a bit insipid, but no one thinks of that, so easy are the postures, so gracious the whole effect, so instinct with the quiet good breeding of an academic pastoral. All the Umbrian reticence and discretion and humility of Raphael are in this beautifully calculated work. It betrays, too, certain ominous symptoms of display, in the way, for example, in which the figures at the window protrude beyond the wall. Primarily this is only a way of softening two ugly angles of the window opening, but it is also a concession to Michelangelo’s dangerous habit of painting away the architecture. All the forms have an amplitude and dignity akin to that of classical sculpture. Hellas is for Raphael no longer a far-away, inaccessible world, as it was, for example, to Botticelli. Raphael has effectively reconstructed it, in part by a gracious act of intuition, in part by study of the wall paintings and statues of old Rome.

The decoration of the Camera della Segnatura was completed triumphantly with the fresco symbolizing Jurisprudence, Figure 189, in which Raphael invents a new and beautiful compositional formula. Having to deal with a lunette awkwardly shortened by the window, he used three seated figures signifying the judging, restraining and rewarding aspects of justice. There is no strict centrality and no exact symmetry. The large curves of the figures play off from each other in a continuous rhythm melting into the bounding curve. One may conceive it in terms of the growth of plants, as so many sprays meeting, diverging, opposing each other, and all managing to conform to the line of an arch. It is a type of composition that Raphael will develop with still greater subtlety in the Sibyls of the Madonna della Pace.

When Raphael finished the Camera della Segnatura he was about twenty-eight years old. His remaining nine years added certain remarkable portraits, the Castiglione, the Leo X, Figure 190, the Fornarina and the young Cardinal at Madrid, one sublime altar-piece, in the Sistine Madonna; a dramatic masterpiece in the Transfiguration, and a few frescoes. But in the main these are years of retrogression. His popularity had got beyond his power to utilize it. Michelangelo in 1512 had unveiled the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Raphael, with all Rome, felt qualities of energy and grandeur which he himself lacked, and, with less than his usual intelligence, began a fruitless emulation. The last three Stanze show in their very look that Raphael is no longer his unperturbed self. The figures no longer hold up their place on the wall, they crowd out toward the spectator appallingly. The compositions no longer show restful patterns which conform to the flatness of the wall. There are disturbing flashes of light and obscure gaps. The figures themselves are contorted and vehement; straining sinews and knotted muscles are advertised for their own sake. Emulating the sublimity of Michelangelo, Raphael only achieves sensationalism. Then he is no longer a painter but a director of painting. Nothing but the designs are now his own. The working sketches and cartoons are by his pupils, who work under the sway of a young Mantuan of facile and brutal talent, Giulio Romano. One passes through the last three Stanze with mixed feelings. The high pleasures of art are left behind; remains the spell of great power and intelligence now almost untouched by taste.

The Stanza of Heliodorus finished in 1514 contains a superbly dramatic fresco of Heliodorus, Figure 191, thrust by a celestial horseman from the temple he would profane. The execution is mostly by Giulio Romano. Raphael himself appears in one of his most massive designs, the Mass of Bolsena. The theme is a sceptical priest persuaded of the truth of the sacramental miracle through the bleeding of the wafer. The miracle takes place in the presence of Pope Julius II. There is a weight of character in the picture which is unique in Raphael’s mural painting. The adjustment of masses is in an impeccable symmetry all the more difficult that the space is irregular and refractory. The fine figures that carry the theme down into the narrow rectangles alongside the window are in part repainted by a young rival of Raphael, Michelangelo’s protegé, Sebastiano del Piombo.

The Chamber of the Incendio, finished in 1517, shows even more plainly the devastating influence of Michelangelo. The subject is a fire arrested miraculously by Pope Leo IV, Figure 192. It is a magnificent display of poses and anatomy, an artistic show window rather than a decoration. The eye wanders in bewilderment to find the picture and finds nothing but isolated, splendid forms posing superbly or simulating unfelt emotions. From the point of view of decoration, the space has been systematically violated. Again the remorseless hand of Giulio Romano is everywhere felt. This is the last anteroom of the Vatican which Raphael saw finished, though he left to his helpers many sketches for the two remaining Stanze.

In 1516 and 1517 Raphael is superintending half a dozen great tasks at once. From the early months of 1515 he had been Bramante’s successor as architect of new St. Peter’s, the same year he became superintendent of all archæological excavations at Rome. To these heavy administrative charges he adds the decoration of the Farnesina, the continuation of the Stanze, designs for mosaics in Santa Maria del Popolo, plans for two private palaces, sixteen cartoons for the Vatican tapestries, and the preliminary studies for the Loggia of the Vatican. He designs half a dozen great altar-pieces and paints with his own hand the Portrait of Leo X, the marvelous St. Cecilia at Bologna, the Sibyls of the Pace, and the Sistine Madonna. He was rich and beloved, great nobles pressed him with social attentions, and a cardinal vainly sought to ally him with his family by marriage.

We can consider these multiform activities of the later years only in general terms. The tapestry cartoons at South Kensington representing the miracles of St. Peter and St. Paul complete that magnificent line of narrative painting that begins with Giotto. Raphael works for simplicity and concentration and dignity in an eminently classic spirit. One feels the influence of Masaccio. Though rudely executed to guide the Flemish weavers and executed by the assistant, Penni, the mind of Raphael controls the form throughout. Such designs as the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Paul Preaching at Athens, the Death of Ananias, the Blinding of the Sorcerer Elymas are among the marvels of our art. Yet many of these designs are over-studied, and few I feel fully bear the comparison with the best of Giotto and Masaccio. A little over-emphasis of style recalls the bitter word of Michelangelo concerning Raphael—that he succeeded not by grace of nature but by study.

The frescoes of the Life of Psyche, in the Farnesina, are beautiful in arrangement and full of a robust paganism. But the wall is overcharged with the weight of figures which too often show Giulio Romano’s heavy and insolent hand. All the same, the whole effect is gracious and the garlanded borders of the coves and spandrels by Giovanni da Udine are delightful. To realize how much these frescoes lost from student execution one has only to consider the Galatea, Figure 192a, in the same Palace, which Raphael painted himself in 1514. It is on the verge of over-ripeness, but keeps its saving element of restraint. In answer to an inquiry from that great diplomat and gentleman, Count Baldassare Castiglione, Raphael wrote that though beautiful models were not rare, for the Galatea as for other figures, he had followed only an idea; and indeed the mind’s eye is what ever counts with Raphael.

Raphael’s final work for the Vatican was the decoration of an open, vaulted Loggia. He invented fifty-two little Bible stories, leaving most of the painting to his assistant, Penni, and he drew about the arches, pilasters and window frames the most delicious arabesques. From study of similar decoration in the Baths of Titus he worked out a style, crisp, formal and sophisticated, and as various as Gothic ornament itself. Geometrical, animal, and plant forms meet and blend audaciously. There is interplay of spiral and angular motives, the whole effect is highly playful and ingenious. The style has had vogue to our own day and still speaks to us charmingly of the unserious side of Raphael.

Perhaps in the harassed, competitive years we have been describing, Raphael turned occasionally upon his own ingenuity, and refreshed himself by renewing these simple and gracious modes in which he had been bred. Such a theory would account for the Sistine Madonna, Figure 193, and in part for his last picture, the Transfiguration. The most memorable of Raphael’s Madonnas is based on the lucid symmetry of Perugino. Although, for greater concentration, the background is merely a sky, the hovering figures are easily spaced in the usual triangle. The effect is ineffably grand and gentle. A quiet silvery cloudland is created and filled by the devotion of the attendant saints and the inspired glance of the Virgin and her Son. With all the resources of the Renaissance, Raphael has expressed an emotion as intense and reverent as that of Fra Angelico. It is an amazing act of the sympathetic intelligence, for there is no reason to suppose that the painter was ever a deeply religious spirit.

Almost as traditional was the unfinished picture before which in springtime of 1520 Raphael’s body lay in state. The Transfiguration, Figure 194, repeats the method of the Disputa. The celestial group of Christ and Moses and Elijah is disposed as Perugino would have counselled, in a swaying triangular group set before the gulf of the firmament. Raphael painted this part with his own hand. The lower part, which was left to Giulio Romano to finish, rests on the maxims and practice of Leonardo. An energetic variety compelled into a close balance is the ideal, a formal order which contains and softens otherwise extravagant expressions and gestures. There is perhaps intended not merely an illustration of the Gospel text, but also the contrast between that life of contemplation towards which the soul aspires, and that world of suffering of mind and body which presses closely upon our rare moments of spiritual escape.

Even that world of facts had been very kind to Raphael. It was fitting then that in his last days he should forget the haunting spectre of Michelangelo’s sublimity, and should use his last forces in an imitation which was a sort of gratitude to those two great masters who had set him on the right way. One would like to believe that the Sistine Madonna and the Transfiguration are the sign that Raphael when overtaken by an untimely death was purging himself of an unfruitful rivalry, and becoming once more master of his own soul. Yet since even Michelangelo shipwrecked on the Michelangelesque, it is an open question whether Raphael could ever have permanently recovered his natural equipoise. However that be, Raphael in the glorious years from 1500 to 1512 resumes and perfects every gentle, orderly, and reasonable strain in Italian painting. Whether in portraiture or narrative, in mythology or symbolism, in pictures of the Madonna or in pure decoration, he gave to Italian painting its final stamp. He achieved a grandeur of space composition akin to the movement of a symphony, a hidden structure more appealing than any separate hue or form. His best work rests on a great humility, and his later pride went far towards undoing him as an artist. Such pride was the breath of life and the source of strength to his rival Michelangelo, the fulfiller and perfector of everything that had been insurgent, unbounded and not quite reasonable in the art of Florence.

By a peculiar irony all that was valuable in such truculent and self-sufficing predecessors as Donatello and Bertoldo, Andrea del Castagno, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli was finally concentrated in the small and ill-favored body of a neurasthenic. There is the tragedy of Michelangelo^[69] in its simplest terms. A Titan in capacity to feel and work, he lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and fear. Thrice he ran away from physical danger, once was virtually a military deserter. To unworthy dependent relatives he gave lavishly, scolding and fretting as he gave. He deliberately affronted two of the most courteous and accomplished colleagues, Leonardo da Vinci and Perugino. He suspected the worst of his gracious and generous rival, Raphael. From a Roman studio as unkempt and filthy as its owner, he snarled at the world and himself like a dog from a kennel.

Yet, note the paradox, this snarling is embodied in fine poetry, and this haggard and more than untidy artist is the friend of such elect spirits as Tommaso Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna. Transient solaces. Near the end of his long life he writes:—

These were the words of a man who was admired like a god and had achieved a lifework of unexampled copiousness and athleticism.

The great enigma, how Michelangelo converted what are usually weaknesses into sources of artistic strength, may best be faced in his life and works. He was born at Caprese in 1475, soon taken back to Florence and put to nurse with a stonecutter’s wife, with whose milk he later used to say he sucked in the mallets and chisels he wielded so powerfully. At thirteen he was articled to Ghirlandaio as a paid assistant and doubtless did some minor work on those prettiest of frescoes in the choir of Santa Maria Novella. Extricating himself from an uncongenial task, he became one of the protegés of Lorenzo de’ Medici, studying the antique marbles of the Medici Gardens under the kindly guidance of old Bertoldo. There he mingled freely for three years in the most learned and gentle society of the time. He mastered anatomy and modelling, searched the compositional secrets of Masaccio. Soon Savonarola’s revolution dismantled that artistic paradise which had been the Medici Gardens, and Michelangelo became what he frequently was afterwards, a fugitive and a solitary man, without either fixed friendships or abiding place.

How he made himself great in sculpture is not our theme. He was thirty and already the master of the David and the Pietà before he began to be a painter. His first commission, in 1505, was for a Holy Family, Figure 195, in medallion form for Agnolo Doni, who at the same time was having his portrait painted by Raphael. The picture as we see it in the Uffizi shows a master who thinks in fresco. The brown flesh, the dull yellows and blues of the draperies could have come from the Brancacci chapel. Remarkable is the complete waiver of charm and sweetness. The superb figures are skilfully contorted into interesting poses, the circle is densely filled and the few interstices left by the main figures are filled with athletic nudes. The aim, which is successfully attained, is an austere grandeur. There is to be no ordinary human appeal in our youthful Lord and his parents.

At this moment Leonardo was already well advanced on the cartoon for the Battle of the Standard, treating it in terms of literal narrative. In 1505 Michelangelo received a signal honor in the commission for the companion fresco, the Battle of Pisa. Both were for the Hall of the Great Council. We can imagine Michelangelo casting about for a reason to abandon a narrative treatment and to find one that could be expressed by the nude. He found it in an incident in Leonardo Aretino’s Chronicle. It seemed that the trumpet found the Florentine men-at-arms bathing in the Arno. Here was the theme of what was properly called The Bathers. Great muscular forms are drawing themselves up the bank, and are hurrying into clothes and armor. We have not a fight, but its alarm and imminence, a fine imaginative substitute for the obvious event. The picture was never executed, and the cartoon, which was the marvel of its day, was soon destroyed, but Michelangelo’s sketches tells us something of the composition, and the contemporary engraver, Marcantonio, Figure 196, has left us a masterly print of the central group. It is plain that Michelangelo made a display of minute anatomy that put his contemporaries to shame, plain also that he subordinated this feature to monumental effect. The failure to execute the fresco and the destruction of the cartoon must count among the capital losses in the history of art.

Burdened already with the impossible task of the tomb of Julius II, Michelangelo was called to Rome to fresco the vault of the Sistine Chapel. Contemporary gossip believed that he was proposed by the jealous and shifty Bramante, architect of St. Peter’s, in the hope of discrediting him. If so, Bramante reckoned ill. At first Michelangelo planned a very modest scheme of colossal figures of Apostles in the twelve spandrels. Soon, dismissing his incompetent helpers, he attacked single-handed the present great scheme. He worked at it four bitter years, and came out of it temporarily crippled and with eyes distorted from the constant strain of looking upwards. The ceiling was unveiled on All Saint’s Day of 1512 and has been a portent ever since.

Enter the Sistine Chapel, turn your back to the overwhelming apparition of the Last Judgment, and your eye will naturally seek the lightest part of the rich decoration. In a long strip, down the centre of the ceiling, made up of nine oblongs alternately large and small, colossal figures stand out against the sky. We see the drama of the Creation and Fall of man. Nude titans play the minor parts in so many simultaneous scenes. The gigantic, draped form of the Eternal dominates the first five. We see him an aged athlete, an expression of utmost physical force, rending chaos asunder into light and darkness; by his touch illumining the sun and moon; Figure 197, drawing out the plants from the earth. I know no more sublime conception in painting than the figure of God assigning the oceans their place, Figure 198. Here is a form that would weigh tons hovering with the lightness of an eagle in space, with extended beneficent arms as solid as reality but coaxed out of the wet plaster with touch and hues as delicate as those of a Whistler symphony. A miracle of conception and of workmanship.

The eye will dwell longest on the great fresco of the Creation of Adam, Figure 199. It is all noble energy in the figure of God giving life by His touch, all noble languor in the relaxed form of Adam only dimly conscious of himself and wistful. There could be no truer or more striking illustration of the pessimistic view that life was imposed upon the earth and brought sadness with it. The titan form of Adam has a singular and enigmatic relaxation. He undergoes a gift he has never besought and faces it with something between confusion, mistrust and resignation. Perhaps the splendid body would have been more at ease, had the soul not been added. So in a spirit of Christian pessimism Michelangelo represents Deity sharing its divine powers with the first man.

At the centre of the ceiling is the creation of Eve, again an extraordinary study in lassitude, but with a significant difference in the figure of Eve. The woman, the chosen receptacle and transmitter of life, accepts the gift eagerly. She presses up to God in thankful adoration. No doubts or ambiguities here. And what a figure—fit to be the mother of a race, exulting already in a fecundity that is to be most grievous. Compare her action with the languid and almost disdainful gesture of Adam in the last fresco, and learn that if the world is still peopled it is due to the unreflective and unshaken fealty to life of all Eve’s true daughters.

Perhaps the most decorative subject, if one may use the word of themes so morally impressive, is that which represents the sin of the forbidden fruit and the expulsion from Eden, Figure 200. The elements of pathos which are strong in the story of Genesis are absent. Michelangelo has not deigned to show us a habitable or desirable Eden. We see instead the swiftly changing episodes of a great doom, which culminates in this scene. Marvelous are the paired groups, superb the contrast between careless appetite under the tree of knowledge and utter shame in the exiled pair. One feels that Eve, who shrinks most, will soonest recover. Her mission is still valid in the world of sin and shame. The composition is the first one made up entirely of nudes.

We may pass quickly over the three compartments devoted to the story of Noah. The scale of the figures, especially in the Deluge, is too small to count at the distance from the eye. These three frescoes were the beginning of the work, the proper scale being arrived at through trial and error. Inherently the two small oblongs are among the most beautiful in the ceiling, having a stylistic grace that is less marked in the earlier more august themes. With the charm of Greek intaglios these stories of Noah combine monumentality.

I have tried to put myself in the position of a visitor to the Sistine Chapel following the instincts of his eye. At this point, having glanced over the ceiling, his mind might well come in and ask the meaning of a whole of which he is becoming dimly aware. The nine scenes above are simply the historic axioms upon which the Christian scheme of redemption is based. The abstract sparseness of the nine episodes from Genesis is justified by the fact that they are less human events than terms in a great argument, which runs as follows: We were created innocent, sinned in our first parents, were spared in the world-flood and promised eventual redemption.

This prolonged drama of redemption is witnessed by a solemn chorus of draped male and female figures enthroned impressively in the spandrels. Here, representing respectively the pagan and Hebrew world, are seven sibyls and five prophets who had the dim but certain vision of a coming Redeemer. These figures as Hawthorne has well said are “necessarily so gigantic because the weight of thought within them is so massive.” They brood quietly or sway with the burden of yearning. They are magnificently draped and contrast most decoratively with the many nudes of the ceiling. They vary in age and disposition. Contrast the actively inspired and youthful Daniel, or the fiery Ezechiel with the ponderous gravity of Jeremiah, Figure 201. What shades of delicate characterization are in the athletic loveliness of the Delphic Sibyl, Figure 202, the powerfully concentrated senility of The Cumean Sibyl, she who predicted to Virgil the new era of salvation, and the aristocratic aloofness of the Libyan seeress, Figure 203, most daintily preparing her day’s work in divination.

Magnificent is the indignant sprawling form of the unwilling prophet Jonah, remanded by the sea to an ungrateful mission. He is the active counterpart of the passive Adam on the ceiling. He obeys under protest. The form itself, foreshortened against the curve of the spandrel, is a masterpiece of draughtsmanship. Decoratively it is the link between the nudes of the ceiling and the draped prophets and sibyls.

Below the prophetic figures, in the older frescoes of the side walls, are set the foreshadowing of the work of salvation in the life of Moses and its accomplishment in the life of Christ, and the drama closes with Michelangelo’s Last Judgment on the altar wall. There Christ separates eternally the saved from the damned, echoing the definitive gesture with which God in the adjoining ceiling separates light from darkness. So the scheme closes with the inexorable logic with which it began.

The decorative task of Michelangelo was to mediate between the prophets and sibyls and the ceiling frescoes above, and likewise to link the great figures with the side walls below. Above, he set a multitude of nude forms. On the massive sides of the twelve thrones are four caryatids in two pairs. At the top of these piers are seated the lithe forms of nude youths, Figure 198, forty in all, supporting medallions and bent into every conceivable attitude that might set off the flexibility and power of these superb young bodies. But however extravagant any single pose may be, it is immediately balanced by an opposing thrust from some other body, so that the whole composition is locked together into an active and thrilling equilibrium. Even the triangles over the coves are filled with huddled nudes most adroitly disposed in the narrow and refractory spaces.

Below the prophets and sibyls, the linking motives are made up of draped figures. Weakest are the caryatid geniuses below each throne. The triangular splays at the corners contain those four bloody and sensational acts which assured the perpetuity of God’s Chosen People—the Raising of the Brazen Serpent, the Slaying of Goliath and of Holophernes, the Hanging of Haaman.

In the triangles roofing the coves and in the lunettes about the arched window heads are family groups of the ancestors and precursors of Christ. Figure 204. The mood of anticipation which has been calm and official in the prophets becomes agitated, passionate, personal in these half hidden groups. So many pilgrims of eternity yearn for the fulfillment that shall give meaning to their wanderings—a promised goal and rest. Very subtle and beautiful is the contrast between the groups sundered by the window heads, individually meditative, and those which blend their longing in the close relations forced by the triangular coves. What has begun as noble abstraction finishes in terms of almost inexpressible tenderness. In color the whole gigantic composition is unified by a sonorous chord of yellow and violet which is moderately asserted in the ceiling and pushed to the utmost in the spandrels. Of the color John La Farge has written: “The unity is so great, the balance of effects so harmonious, that it is only by study that we see expressed in the methods of the painting the ancient rules, handed down by practice, which unite with the latest teaching of modern scientific coloring.” What a mind it took to hold the tumultuous and pathetic details of this great work within an enveloping order and calm!

In framing his great work out of nudes relieved by draped figures, Michelangelo renewed the Grecian practice. Precisely the difference between the Sistine ceiling and the metopes of the Parthenon, or the frieze of Pergamon, raises the question—What does the nude of Michelangelo express? I do not find in it, at least in the Sistine ceiling, much of that terribleness, terribiltà, which has been remarked by critics from Vasari to Henri Beyle. It seems to me rather an art of lassitude and relaxation, the reluctantly awaking Adam being the clue to the mood. Except for the gestures of God and Eve, the gestures and poses are unspecific. The lithe bodies of the slaves are twisted only that they may attain consciousness of powers which have no use. The relaxation which marks nearly all the nudes, whether in the stories or in the incidental ornament, is not that of fatigue after action, nor yet that of preparation for an ordeal. In barren lassitude we have expressed powers which do not imply action or use, but breathe a great melancholy. We are far from the splendors of passion and achievement, we see humanity confused at a fate that calls itself God, a passive factor in an arbitrary process that makes the glory of the flesh a vain thing. As a humanist, Michelangelo asserts that failing glory, as a Christian he accepts the nothingness of mankind and the rightness of God’s inscrutable and apparently cruel designs. Perhaps the spell of Michelangelo, his æsthetic, to put it pedantically, is simply the noble resignation with which the humanist accepts the Christian pessimism as regards this world. And here I may note that Rodin has significantly shown that even the forms of Michelangelo are not uprising and resilient like the antique, but compressed and yielding like those of the Christian Gothic sculptors.

Twenty-one years after the Sistine ceiling was unveiled, Michelangelo began reluctantly the great fresco of the Last Judgment, Figure 205. He worked on it for seven years, and it was unveiled on Christmas Day of 1541. How the choristers had the heart to chant the angelic message of peace and good will before it, I cannot imagine. Michelangelo was sixty-six years old, a disillusioned and embittered man, an alien in the corrupt and pleasure loving Rome of Paul III. He has put into the Christ all his contempt for mankind. The Christ who earlier wrathfully hurled the darts in the Umbrian plague banners has become a far darting Apollo, Figure 206, rejoicing in his dire task. Behind him the murky air is full of hurtling contorted angels, in aspect quite indistinguishable from fiends, who bear the implements of the Passion. Below, the just and unjust rise or fall in knots and festoons of writhing nude bodies all equally sinister. The conception is violently corporeal, and never elsewhere in painting has the human body been used with such ingenuity and power. But it is a power that defeats itself. I believe the spectator is not so much appalled as confused before the Last Judgment. Its vehemence seems so unrelieved and insensate. If this be indeed the goal of mankind, no wonder moody Adam in the ceiling above faces his Creator with doubt and a hint of distrust.

Its sheer display of force won all contemporaries, and the French critic and superman, Stendhal, has highly praised the work for its burning energy. While not sharing his enthusiasm, I gladly refer the reader to his admirable pages. In my own opinion the creative ardor of Michelangelo had waned by this time. He offers, instead, his spleen, which is more valuable than most men’s genius, and his amazing technical skill. Michelangelo has become Michelangelesque. That is deplorably true in the frescoes for the Pauline Chapel which were finished in 1547, his seventy-second year. Nothing is left but sensationalism, and the Pope does well not to exhibit these works. As regards humanity, Michelangelo’s vein is completely exhausted. He still is capable of exquisite calculation, as in the design for the dome of St. Peter’s, still retains a dæmonic capacity for work and emotion, but the sculptor in him is nearly dead and the painter completely so. The poet of the rugged sonnets has superseded them both. When he died at 89, in 1564, the little ill-favored body was honored like that of a king. His sheer power had swept the whole rising generation of artists under his sway. To their own hurt and to the bankruptcy of the Golden Age.

Such forms as Michelangelo’s are tolerable only when possessed by that melancholy poetry of his which gives them meaning. If the serene intelligence of a Raphael had not found emotions to fill such forms, if Michelangelo himself in his later years falls back on a monotonous formula of terribleness, what hope was there for such uninspired imitators as the Venustis, Volterras, and Vasaris? One and all, they entertained monstrous delusions of effortless attainment—cleverly contorted their nudes, shrewdly calculated their terrors. And the Roman art of the Golden Age, forgetting both the wise humility of Umbria and the reasonable pride of Florence, suddenly collapsed in the ugliest and most irrational ostentation. Michelangelo had passed—to fulfill and to destroy.

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER VI

A Contemporary List of Great Artists, before 1510

In an offhand mention in The Courtier Baldasarre Castiglione tells us who seemed to be great artists to a cultured and well-informed gentleman about the year 1508. Titian had not yet emerged and of the older men only Leonardo da Vinci and Mantegna are remembered. As seniors, they are the first mentioned.

“Again various things give equal pleasure to the eyes, so that we can with difficulty decide what are more pleasing to them. You know that in painting Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giorgio da Castelfranco are very excellent, yet they are all unlike in their work; so that no one of them seems to lack anything in his own manner, since each is known as the most perfect in his style.”

The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldesar Castiglione, translated by Leonard Ekstein Opdycke, New York, 1903, p. 50.