ion may
strike us as _rococo_ now, but the accent of praise and appreciation
is surely genuine. Varchi's enthusiastic comment on the sonnets xxx,
xxxi, and lii, published to men of letters, taste, and learning in
Florence and all Italy, is the strongest vindication of their
innocence against editors and scholars who in various ways have
attempted to disfigure or to misconstrue them.

CHAPTER XIII

I

The correspondence which I used in the eleventh chapter, while
describing Michelangelo's difficulties regarding the final contract
with the Duke of Urbino, proves that he had not begun to paint the
frescoes of the Cappella Paolina in October 1542. They were carried on
with interruptions during the next seven years. These pictures, the
last on which his talents were employed, are two large subjects: the
Conversion of S. Paul, and the Martyrdom of S. Peter. They have
suffered from smoke and other injuries of time even more than the
frescoes of the Sistine, and can now be scarcely appreciated owing to
discoloration. Nevertheless, at no period, even when fresh from the
master's hand, can they have been typical of his style. It is true
that contemporaries were not of this opinion. Condivi calls both of
them "stupendous not only in the general exposition of the histories
but also in the details of each figure." It is also true that the
technical finish of these large compositions shows a perfect mastery
of painting, and that the great designer has not lost his power of
dealing at will with the human body. But the frigidity of old age had
fallen on his feeling and imagination. The faces of his saints and
angels here are more inexpressive than those of the Last Judgment. The
type of form has become still more rigidly schematic. All those
figures in violent attitudes have been invented in the artist's brain
without reference to nature; and the activity of movement which he
means to suggest, is frozen, petrified, suspended. The suppleness, the
elasticity, the sympathy with which Michelangelo handled the nude,
when he began to paint in the Sistine Chapel, have disappeared. We
cannot refrain from regretting that seven years of his energetic old
age should have been devoted to work so obviously indicative of
decaying faculties.

The Cappella Paolina ran a risk of destruction by fire during the
course of his operations there. Michelangelo wrote to Del Riccio in
1545, reminding him that part of the roof had been consumed, and