h
with which the multitudes of saved and damned are equally endowed,
befit that extremity of physical and mental anguish more than they
suit the serenity of bliss eternal. There is a wretch, twined round
with fiends, gazing straight before him as he sinks; one half of his
face is buried in his hand, the other fixed in a stony spasm of
despair, foreshadowing perpetuity of hell. Nothing could express with
sublimity of a higher order the sense of irremediable loss, eternal
pain, a future endless without hope, than the rigid dignity of this
not ignoble sinner's dread. Just below is the place to which the
doomed are sinking. Michelangelo reverted to Dante for the symbolism
chosen to portray hell. Charon, the demon, with eyes of burning coal,
compels a crowd of spirits in his ferryboat. They land and are
received by devils, who drag them before Minos, judge of the infernal
regions. He towers at the extreme right end of the fresco, indicating
that the nether regions yawn infinitely deep, beyond our ken; just as
the angels above Christ suggest a region of light and glory, extending
upward through illimitable space. The scene of judgment on which
attention is concentrated forms but an episode in the universal,
sempiternal scheme of things. Balancing hell, on the left hand of the
spectator, is brute earth, the grave, the forming and the swallowing
clay, out of which souls, not yet acquitted or condemned, emerge with
difficulty, in varied forms of skeletons or corpses, slowly thawing
into life eternal.

Vasari, in his description of the Last Judgment, seized upon what
after all endures as the most salient aspect of this puzzling work, at
once so fascinating and so repellent. "It is obvious," he says, "that
the peerless painter did not aim at anything but the portrayal of the
human body in perfect proportions and most varied attitudes, together
with the passions and affections of the soul. That was enough for him,
and here he has no equal. He wanted to exhibit the grand style:
consummate draughtsmanship in the nude, mastery over all problems of
design. He concentrated his power upon the human form, attending to
that alone, and neglecting all subsidiary things, as charm of colour,
capricious inventions, delicate devices and novelties of fancy."
Vasari might have added that Michelangelo also neglected what ought to
have been a main object of his art: convincing eloquence, the
solemnity proper to his theme, spirituality of earthly gr