urning to the first composition, he
repeated that, or so much of it as could be transferred to a single
sheet, on the exact scale of the intended fresco. These enlarged
drawings were applied to the wet surface of the plaster, and their
outlines pricked in with dots to guide the painter in his brush-work.
When we reflect upon the extent of the Sistine vault (it is estimated
at more than 10,000 square feet of surface), and the difficulties
presented by its curves, lunettes, spandrels, and pendentives; when we
remember that this enormous space is alive with 343 figures in every
conceivable attitude, some of them twelve feet in height, those seated
as prophets and sibyls measuring nearly eighteen feet when upright,
all animated with extraordinary vigour, presenting types of the utmost
variety and vivid beauty, imagination quails before the intellectual
energy which could first conceive a scheme so complex, and then carry
it out with mathematical precision in its minutest details.

The date on which Michelangelo actually began to paint the fresco is
not certain. Supposing he worked hard all the summer, he might have
done so when his Florentine assistants arrived in August; and,
assuming that the letter to his father above quoted (_Lettere_, x.)
bears a right date, he must have been in full swing before the end of
January 1509. In that letter he mentions that Jacopo, probably
l'Indaco, "the painter whom I brought from Florence, returned a few
days ago; and as he complained about me here in Rome, it is likely
that he will do so there. Turn a deaf ear to him; he is a thousandfold
in the wrong, and I could say much about his bad behaviour toward me."
Vasari informs us that these assistants proved of no use; whereupon,
he destroyed all they had begun to do, refused to see them, locked
himself up in the chapel, and determined to complete the work in
solitude. It seems certain that the painters were sent back to
Florence. Michelangelo had already provided for the possibility of
their not being able to co-operate with him; but what the cause of
their failure was we can only conjecture. Trained in the methods of
the old Florentine school of fresco-painting, incapable of entering
into the spirit of a style so supereminently noble and so astoundingly
original as Michelangelo's, it is probable that they spoiled his
designs in their attempts to colour them. Harford pithily remarks: "As
none of the suitors of Penelope could bend the bow o