es displaying what
Vasari called the "modern" style in its most sublime and imposing
manifestation. At the same time he closed the cycle of the figurative
arts, and rendered any further progress on the same lines impossible.
The growth which began with Niccolo of Pisa and with Cimabue, which
advanced through Giotto and his school, Perugino and Pinturicchio,
Piero della Francesca and Signorelli, Fra Angelico and Benozzo
Gozzoli, the Ghirlandajo brothers, the Lippi and Botticelli,
effloresced in Michelangelo, leaving nothing for aftercomers but
manneristic imitation.

II

Michelangelo, instinctively and on principle, reacted against the
decorative methods of the fifteenth century. If he had to paint a
biblical or mythological subject, he avoided landscapes, trees,
flowers, birds, beasts, and subordinate groups of figures. He eschewed
the arabesques, the labyrinths of foliage and fruit enclosing pictured
panels, the candelabra and gay bands of variegated patterns, which
enabled a _quattrocento_ painter, like Gozzoli or Pinturicchio, to
produce brilliant and harmonious general effects at a small
expenditure of intellectual energy. Where the human body struck the
keynote of the music in a work of art, he judged that such simple
adjuncts and naive concessions to the pleasure of the eye should be
avoided. An architectural foundation for the plastic forms to rest on,
as plain in structure and as grandiose in line as could be fashioned,
must suffice. These principles he put immediately to the test in his
first decorative undertaking. For the vault of the Sistine he designed
a mighty architectural framework in the form of a hypaethral temple,
suspended in the air on jutting pilasters, with bold cornices,
projecting brackets, and ribbed arches flung across the void of
heaven. Since the whole of this ideal building was painted upon
plaster, its inconsequence, want of support, and disconnection from
the ground-plan of the chapel do not strike the mind. It is felt to be
a mere basis for the display of pictorial art, the theatre for a
thousand shapes of dignity and beauty.

I have called this imaginary temple hypaethral, because the master
left nine openings in the flattened surface of the central vault. They
are unequal in size, five being short parallelograms, and four being
spaces of the same shape but twice their length. Through these the eye
is supposed to pierce the roof and discover the unfettered region of
the heavens.