empire! Moreover, even
the decorative figures of the pilasters at the corners of the frescoes
celebrate the triumph of the flesh: there are the twenty young men
radiant in their nakedness, with incomparable splendour of torso and of
limb, and such intensity of life that a craze for motion seems to carry
them off, bend them, throw them over in superb attitudes. And between the
windows are the giants, the prophets and the sibyls--man and woman
deified, with inordinate wealth of muscle and grandeur of intellectual
expression. There is Jeremiah with his elbow resting on his knee and his
chin on his hand, plunged as he is in reflection--in the very depths of
his visions and his dreams; there is the Sibylla Erithraea, so pure of
profile, so young despite the opulence of her form, and with one finger
resting on the open book of destiny; there is Isaiah with the thick lips
of truth, virile and haughty, his head half turned and his hand raised
with a gesture of command; there is the Sibylla Cumaea, terrifying with
her science and her old age, her wrinkled countenance, her vulture's
nose, her square protruding chin; there is Jonah cast forth by the whale,
and wondrously foreshortened, his torso twisted, his arms bent, his head
thrown back, and his mouth agape and shouting: and there are the others,
all of the same full-blown, majestic family, reigning with the
sovereignty of eternal health and intelligence, and typifying the dream
of a broader, loftier, and indestructible humanity. Moreover, in the
lunettes and the arches over the windows other figures of grace, power,
and beauty appear and throng, the ancestors of the Christ, thoughtful
mothers with lovely nude infants, men with wondering eyes peering into
the future, representatives of the punished weary race longing for the
promised Redeemer; while in the pendentives of the four corners various
biblical episodes, the victories of Israel over the Spirit of Evil,
spring into life. And finally there is the gigantic fresco at the far
end, the Last Judgment with its swarming multitude, so numerous that days
and days are needed to see each figure aright, a distracted crowd, full
of the hot breath of life, from the dead rising in response to the
furious trumpeting of the angels, from the fearsome groups of the damned
whom the demons fling into hell, even to Jesus the justiciar, surrounded
by the saints and apostles, and to the radiant concourse of the blessed
who ascend upheld by ange