d respectively. During the
eighty-nine years of his earthly pilgrimage he saw Italy enslaved and
Florence extinguished; it was his exceeding bitter fate to watch the rapid
decay of the arts and to witness the triumph of sacerdotal despotism over
liberal thought. To none of these things was he indifferent; and the
sorrow they wrought in his soul, found expression in his painting.[264]
Michael Angelo was not framed by nature to fascinate like Lionardo or to
charm like Raphael. His manners were severe and simple. When he spoke, his
words were brief and pungent. When he wrote, whether in poetry or prose,
he used the fewest phrases to express the most condensed meaning. When
asked why he had not married, he replied that the wife he had--his
art--cost him already too much trouble. He entertained few friends, and
shunned society. Brooding over the sermons of Savonarola, the text of the
Bible, the discourses of Plato, and the poems of Dante, he made his spirit
strong in solitude by the companionship with everlasting thoughts.
Therefore, when he was called to paint the Sistine Chapel, he uttered
through painting the weightiest prophecy the world has ever seen expressed
in plastic form. His theme is nothing less than the burden of the prophets
and the Sibyls who preached the coming of a light upon the world, and the
condemnation of the world which had rejected it, by an inexorable judge.
Michelet says, not without truth, that the spirit of Savonarola lives
again in these frescoes. The procession of the four-and-twenty elders,
arraigned before the people of Brescia to accuse Italy of sin--the voice
that cried to Florence, "Behold the sword of the Lord, and that swiftly!
Behold I, even I, do bring a deluge on the earth!" are both seen and heard
here very plainly. But there is more than Savonarola in this prophecy of
Michael Angelo's. It contains the stern spirit of Dante, aflame with
patriotism, passionate for justice. It embodies the philosophy of Plato.
The creative God, who divides light from darkness, who draws Adam from the
clay and calls forth new-born Eve in awful beauty, is the Demiurgus of
the Greek. Again, it carries the indignation of Isaiah, the wild
denunciations of Ezekiel, the monotonous refrain of Jeremiah--"Ah, Lord,
Lord!" The classic Sibyls intone their mystic hymns; the Delphic on her
tripod of inspiration, the Erythraean bending over her scrolls, the
withered witch of Cumae, the parched prophetess of Libya--all se