But here again Michelangelo betrayed the inconsequence of
his invention. He filled the spaces in question with nine dominant
paintings, representing the history of the Creation, the Fall, and the
Deluge. Taking our position at the west end of the chapel and looking
upwards, we see in the first compartment God dividing light from
darkness; in the second, creating the sun and the moon and the solid
earth; in the third, animating the ocean with His brooding influence;
in the fourth, creating Adam; in the fifth, creating Eve. The sixth
represents the temptation of our first parents and their expulsion
from Paradise. The seventh shows Noah's sacrifice before entering the
ark; the eighth depicts the Deluge, and the ninth the drunkenness of
Noah. It is clear that, between the architectural conception of a roof
opening on the skies and these pictures of events which happened upon
earth, there is no logical connection. Indeed, Michelangelo's new
system of decoration bordered dangerously upon the barocco style, and
contained within itself the germs of a vicious mannerism.

It would be captious and unjust to push this criticism home. The
architectural setting provided for the figures and the pictures of the
Sistine vault is so obviously conventional, every point of vantage has
been so skilfully appropriated to plastic uses, every square inch of
the ideal building becomes so naturally, and without confusion, a
pedestal for the human form, that we are lost in wonder at the
synthetic imagination which here for the first time combined the arts
of architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single organism. Each
part of the immense composition, down to the smallest detail, is
necessary to the total effect. We are in the presence of a most
complicated yet mathematically ordered scheme, which owes life and
animation to one master-thought. In spite of its complexity and
scientific precision, the vault of the Sistine does not strike the
mind as being artificial or worked out by calculation, but as being
predestined to existence, inevitable, a cosmos instinct with vitality.

On the pendentives between the spaces of the windows, running up to
the ends of each of the five lesser pictures, Michelangelo placed
alternate prophets and sibyls upon firm projecting consoles. Five
sibyls and five prophets run along the side-walls of the chapel. The
end-walls sustain each of them a prophet. These twelve figures are
introduced as heralds and pioneers o