f Christ the Saviour, whose
presence on the earth is demanded by the fall of man and the renewal
of sin after the Deluge. In the lunettes above the windows and the
arched recesses or spandrels over them are depicted scenes setting
forth the genealogy of Christ and of His Mother. At each of the four
corner-spandrels of the ceiling, Michelangelo painted, in spaces of a
very peculiar shape and on a surface of embarrassing inequality, one
magnificent subject symbolical of man's redemption. The first is the
raising of the Brazen Serpent in the wilderness; the second, the
punishment of Haman; the third, the victory of David over Goliath; the
fourth, Judith with the head of Holofernes.

Thus, with a profound knowledge of the Bible, and with an intense
feeling for religious symbolism, Michelangelo unrolled the history of
the creation of the world and man, the entrance of sin into the human
heart, the punishment of sin by water, and the reappearance of sin in
Noah's family. Having done this, he intimated, by means of four
special mercies granted to the Jewish people--types and symbols of
God's indulgence--that a Saviour would arise to redeem the erring
human race. In confirmation of this promise, he called twelve potent
witnesses, seven of the Hebrew prophets and five of the Pagan sibyls.
He made appeal to history, and set around the thrones on which these
witnesses are seated scenes detached from the actual lives of our
Lord's human ancestors.

The intellectual power of this conception is at least equal to the
majesty and sublime strength of its artistic presentation. An awful
sense of coming doom and merited damnation hangs in the thunderous
canopy of the Sistine vault, tempered by a solemn and sober
expectation of the Saviour. It is much to be regretted that Christ,
the Desired of all Nations, the Redeemer and Atoner, appears nowhere
adequately represented in the Chapel. When Michelangelo resumed his
work there, it was to portray him as an angered Hercules, hurling
curses upon helpless victims. The August rhetoric of the ceiling loses
its effective value when we can nowhere point to Christ's life and
work on earth; when there is no picture of the Nativity, none of the
Crucifixion, none of the Resurrection; and when the feeble panels of a
Perugino and a Cosimo Rosselli are crushed into insignificance by the
terrible Last Judgment. In spite of Buonarroti's great creative
strength, and injuriously to his real feeling as a Chri