the Sistine
Chapel, he implored the Pope that he might be allowed to finish the
mausoleum which he had begun, and that Raphael, then dazzling the whole
city by his unprecedented talents, might be substituted for him in that
great work. But the Pope was inflexible; and the great artist began his
task, assisted by other painters; however, he soon got disgusted with
them and sent them away, and worked alone. For twenty months he toiled,
rarely seen, living abstemiously, absorbed utterly in his work of
creation; and the greater portion of the compartments in the vast
ceiling was finished before any other voice than his, except the
admiring voice of the Pope, pronounced it good.

It would be useless to attempt to describe those celebrated frescos.
Their subjects were taken from the Book of Genesis, with great figures
of sibyls and prophets. They are now half-concealed by the accumulated
dust and smoke of three hundred years, and can be surveyed only by
reclining at full length on the back. We see enough, however, to be
impressed with the boldness, the majesty, and the originality of the
figures,--their fidelity to nature, the knowledge of anatomy displayed,
and the disdain of inferior arts; especially the noble disdain of
appealing to false and perverted taste, as if he painted from an exalted
ideal in his own mind, which ideal is ever associated with
creative power.

It is this creative power which places Michael Angelo at the head of the
artists of his great age; and not merely the power to create but the
power of realizing the most exalted conceptions. Raphael was doubtless
superior to him in grace and beauty, even as Titian afterwards surpassed
him in coloring. He delighted, like Dante, in the awful and the
terrible. This grandeur of conception was especially seen in his Last
Judgment, executed thirty years afterwards, in completion of the Sistine
Chapel, the work on which had been suspended at the death of Julius.
This vast fresco is nearly seventy feet in height, painted upon the wall
at the end of the chapel, as an altar-piece. No subject could have been
better adapted to his genius than this--the day of supernal terrors
(_dies irae, dies illa_), when, according to the sentiments of the
Middle Ages, the doomed were subjected to every variety of physical
suffering, and when this agony of pain, rather than agony of remorse,
was expressed in tortured limbs and in faces writhing with demoniacal
despair. Such was the va