was at last persuaded to betake himself. Julius received the
truant artist kindly, as indeed between these two volcanic
natures there existed a natural affinity, and ordered of him
his own colossal likeness in bronze, to be set up, as a symbol
of his conquering authority, over the principal entrance
of the church of St Petronius. For the next fifteen months
Michelangelo devoted his whole strength to this new task.
The price at which he undertook it left him, as it turned out,
hardly any margin to subsist on. Moreover in the technical
art of metal casting he was inexperienced, and an assistant
whom he had summoned from Florence proved insubordinate
and had to be dismissed. Nevertheless his genius prevailed
over every hardship and difficulty, and on the 21st of February
1508 the majestic bronze colossus of the seated pope, robed and
mitred, with one hand grasping the keys and the other extended
in a gesture of benediction and command, was duly raised to
its station over the church porch. Three years later it was
destroyed in a revolution. The people of Bologna rose against
the authority of Julius; his delegates and partisans were cast
out, and his effigy hurled from its place. The work of Michelangelo,
after being trailed in derision through the streets, was
broken up and its fragments cast into the furnace.
Meanwhile the artist himself, as soon as his work was done, had followed his reconciled master back to Rome. The task that here awaited him, however, was after all not the resumption of the papal monument, but the execution of the series of paintings in the Sixtine chapel which had been mooted before his departure. Painting, he always averred, was not his business; he was aware of his enemy’s hopes that a great enterprise in fresco-painting would prove beyond his powers; and he entered with misgiving and reluctance upon his new undertaking. Destiny, however, so ruled that the work thus thrust upon him remains his chief title to glory. His history is one of indomitable will and almost superhuman energy, yet of will that hardly ever had its way, and of energy continually at war with circumstance. The only work which in all his life he was able to complete as he had conceived it was this of the decoration of the Sixtine ceiling. The pope had at first desired a scheme including figures of the twelve apostles only. Michelangelo began accordingly, but could rest content with nought so meagre, and soon proposed instead a design of many hundred figures embodying the story of Genesis from the Creation to the Flood, with accessory personages of prophets and sibyls dreaming on the new dispensation to come, and, in addition, those of the forefathers of Christ. The whole was to be enclosed and divided by an elaborate framework of painted architecture, with a multitude of nameless human shapes supporting its several members or reposing among them—shapes mediating, as it were, between the features of the inanimate framework and those of the great dramatic and prophetic scenes themselves. The pope bade the artist do as he pleased. By May 1508 the preparations in the chapel had been completed and the work begun. Later in the same year Michelangelo summoned a number of assistant painters from Florence. Trained in the traditions of the earlier Florentine school, they were unable, it seems, to interpret Michelangelo’s designs in fresco either with sufficient freedom or sufficient uniformity of style to satisfy him. At any rate he soon dismissed them, and carried out the remainder of his colossal task alone, except for the necessary amount of purely mechanical and subordinate help. The physical conditions of prolonged work, face upwards, upon this vast expanse of ceiling were adverse and trying in the extreme. After four and a half years of toil the task was accomplished. Michelangelo had during its progress been harassed alike by delays of payment and by hostile intrigue, his ill-wishers casting doubts on his capacity, and vaunting the superior powers of Raphael. That gentle spirit would by nature have been no man’s enemy, but unluckily Michelangelo’s moody, self-concentrated temper prevented the two artists being on terms of amity such as might have stopped the mouths of mischief-makers. Absolute need of funds for the furtherance of the undertaking constrained him at one moment to break off work and pursue his inconsiderate patron as far as Bologna. This was between September 1510, by which time the whole of the great series of subjects along the centre of the vault were completed, and January 1511, when the master set to work again and began filling the complicated lateral spaces of his decorative scheme.
The main field of the Sixtine ceiling—in form a depressed barrel vault—is divided in Michelangelo’s scheme into four larger, alternating with five smaller fields. The following is the order of the subjects depicted in them: (1) the dividing of the light from the darkness; (2) the creation of sun, moon and stars; (3) the creation of the waters; (4) the creation of man; (5) the creation of woman; (6) the temptation and expulsion; (7) the sacrifice of Noah; (8) the deluge; (9) the drunkenness of Noah. The figures in the last three of these scenes are on a smaller scale than those in the first six. In numbers 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 the field of the picture is reduced by the encroachments of the architectural framework with its seated. pairs of supporters, commonly known as “Slaves” or “Atlases.” Flanking these smaller compositions, along the lateral spaces between the crown of the vault and the walls on either side, are seated figures of prophets and sibyls alternately; two other prophets are introduced at each extremity of the series—making seven prophets and five sibyls in all. In the triangles to right and left of the prophets at the two extremities are the death of Goliath, the death of Holofernes, the brazen serpent and the punishment of Haman. In the twelve lunettes above the windows are groups of the ancestors of Christ, their names designated by inscriptions, and in the twelve triangles above them (between the prophets and sibyls) other kindred groups crouched or sitting. These last are all shown in relatively simple human actions and household relations, heightened but not falsified by the artist’s genius, and rising into majestic, significance from roots deep in daily human nature. The work represents all the powers of Michelangelo at their best. Disdaining all the accessory allurements of the painter’s art, he has concentrated himself upon the exclusive delineation of the human form and face at their highest power. His imagination has conceived, and his knowledge and certainty of hand have enabled him to realize, attitudes and combinations of unmatched variety and grandeur, and countenances of unmatched expressiveness and power. But he has not trusted, as he came later to trust, to science and acquired knowledge merely; neither do his personages, so far as they did afterwards, transcend human possibility or leave the facts of actual life behind them. The profoundest knowledge and the most searching realism serve to embody all this inspiration and sustain all this sublimity; the sublimity, moreover is combined with the noblest elements of grace and even of tenderness.. As for the intellectual meanings of his vast design, over and above those which reveal themselves at a first glance or by a bare description, they are from the nature of the case inexhaustible, and can never be perfectly defined. Whatever the soul of this great Florentine, the spiritual heir of Dante, with the Christianity of the middle ages not shaken in his mind, but expanded and transcendentalized, by the knowledge and love of Plato;—whatever the soul of such a man, full of suppressed tenderness and righteous indignation, and of anxious questionings of coming fate could conceive—that Michelangelo has expressed or shadowed forth in this great and significant scheme of paintings. The powers of the artist seem to have expanded with the progress of his work. He seems to have begun (as the spectator entering the chapel has to begin) with what is chronologically the last subject of the series, the drunkenness of Noah, and to have worked backwards, increasing the scale of his figures for their better effect from the fourth subject (the Temptation and Expulsion), and rising in ascending scale of majesty through the successive acts of creation from the last to the first.
The Sixtine chapel was no sooner completed than Michelangelo resumed work upon the marbles for the monument of Julius. But four months only had passed when Julius died. His heirs immediately entered (in the summer of 1513) into a new contract with Michelangelo for the execution of the monument on a reduced scale. What the precise nature and extent of the original design had been we do not know, only that the monument was to be detached from the wall, and to stand four-square and free—a thing hitherto unknown in Renaissance sepulchral architecture—in one of the chapels of St Peter’s. But the new design was extensive and magnificent enough., It was to consist of a great three-sided structure, two courses high, projecting from the church wall, and decorated on its three unattached sides with statues. On the upper course was to be placed the colossal recumbent figures of the pope, with a vision of the Virgin and Child above him, angels mourning at the sides, and prophetic and allegoric personages at the angles—sixteen figures in all. The lower course was to be enriched with twenty-four figures in niches and on projecting pedestals: in the niches, Victories; in front of terminal pilasters between them,
