ossness quit.
As a collection of athletic nudes in all conceivable postures of rest
and action, of foreshortening, of suggested movement, the Last
Judgment remains a stupendous miracle. Nor has the aged master lost
his cunning for the portrayal of divinely simple faces, superb limbs,
masculine beauty, in the ideal persons of young men. The picture, when
we dwell long enough upon its details, emerges into prominence,
moreover, as indubitably awe-inspiring, terrifying, dreadful in its
poignant expression of wrath, retaliation, thirst for vengeance,
cruelty, and helpless horror. But the supreme point even of Doomsday,
of the Dies Irae, has not been seized. We do not hear the still small
voice of pathos and of human hope which thrills through Thomas a
Celano's hymn:--

_Quaerens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus._

The note is one of sustained menace and terror, and the total scheme
of congregated forms might be compared to a sense-deafening solo on a
trombone. While saying this, we must remember that it was the constant
impulse of Michelangelo to seize one moment only, and what he deemed
the most decisive moment, in the theme he had to develop. Having
selected the instant of time at which Christ, half risen from his
Judgment-seat of cloud, raises an omnific hand to curse, the master
caused each fibre of his complex composition to thrill with the
tremendous passion of that coming sentence. The long series of designs
for Crucifixions, Depositions from the Cross, and Pietas which we
possess, all of them belonging to a period of his life not much later
than 1541, prove that his nature was quite as sensitive to pathos as
to terror; only, it was not in him to attempt a combination of terror
and pathos.

"He aimed at the portrayal of the human body. He wanted to exhibit the
grand style." So says Vasari, and Vasari is partly right. But we must
not fall into the paradox, so perversely maintained by Ruskin in his
lecture on Tintoretto and Michelangelo, that the latter was a cold and
heartless artist, caring chiefly for the display of technical skill
and anatomical science. Partial and painful as we may find the meaning
of the Last Judgment, that meaning has been only too powerfully and
personally felt. The denunciations of the prophets, the woes of the
Apocalypse, the invectives of Savonarola, the tragedies of Italian
history, the sense of present and indwelling sin, storm through and