they did not understand one
another and make friends, this was due to the different conceptions
they were framed to take of life the one being the exact antipodes to
the other.

VI

Postponing descriptive or aesthetic criticism of the Sistine frescoes,
I shall proceed with the narration of their gradual completion. We
have few documents to guide us through the period of time which
elapsed between the first uncovering of Michelangelo's work on the
roof of the Sistine (November 1, 1509) and its ultimate accomplishment
(October 1512). His domestic correspondence is abundant, and will be
used in its proper place; but nothing transpires from those pages of
affection, anger, and financial negotiation to throw light upon the
working of the master's mind while he was busied in creating the
sibyls and prophets, the episodes and idyls, which carried his great
Bible of the Fate of Man downwards through the vaulting to a point at
which the Last Judgment had to be presented as a crowning climax. For,
the anxious student of his mind and life-work, nothing is more
desolating than the impassive silence he maintains about his doings as
an artist. He might have told us all we want to know, and never shall
know here about them. But while he revealed his personal temperament
and his passions with singular frankness, he locked up the secret of
his art, and said nothing.

Eventually we must endeavour to grasp Michelangelo's work in the
Sistine as a whole, although it was carried out at distant epochs of
his life. For this reason I have thrown these sentences forward, in
order to embrace a wide span of his artistic energy (from May 10,
1508, to perhaps December 1541). There is, to my mind, a unity of
conception between the history depicted on the vault, the prophets and
forecomers on the pendentives, the types selected for the
spandrels, and the final spectacle of the day of doom. Living, as he
needs must do, under the category of time, Michelangelo was unable to
execute his stupendous picture-book of human destiny in one sustained
manner. Years passed over him of thwarted endeavour and distracted
energies--years of quarrying and sculpturing, of engineering and
obeying the vagaries of successive Popes. Therefore, when he came
at last to paint the Last Judgment, he was a worn man, exhausted in
services of many divers sorts. And, what is most perplexing to the
reconstructive critic, nothing in his correspondence remains to
indicate the