that
it would be necessary to cover it in roughly at once, since the rain
was damaging the frescoes and weakening the walls. When they were
finished, Paul III. appointed an official guardian with a fixed
salary, whose sole business it should be "to clean the frescoes well
and keep them in a state of cleanliness, free from dust and other
impurities, as also from the smoke of candles lighted in both chapels
during divine service." This man had charge of the Sistine as well as
the Pauline Chapel; but his office does not seem to have been
continued after the death of the Farnese. The first guardian nominated
was Buonarroti's favourite servant Urbino.

Vasari, after describing these frescoes in some detail, but without
his customary enthusiasm, goes on to observe: "Michelangelo attended
only, as I have elsewhere said, to the perfection of art. There are no
landscapes, nor trees, nor houses; nor again do we find in his work
that variety of movement and prettiness which may be noticed in the
pictures of other men. He always neglected such decoration, being
unwilling to lower his lofty genius to these details." This is indeed
true of the arid desert of the Pauline frescoes. Then he adds: "They
were his last productions in painting. He was seventy-five years old
when he carried them to completion; and, as he informed me, he did so
with great effort and fatigue--painting, after a certain age, and
especially fresco-painting, not being in truth fit work for old men."

The first of two acute illnesses, which showed that Michelangelo's
constitution was beginning to give way, happened in the summer of
1544. On this occasion Luigi del Riccio took him into his own
apartments at the Casa Strozzi; and here he nursed him with such
personal devotion that the old man afterwards regarded Del Riccio as
the saviour of his life. We learn this from the following pathetic
sonnet:--

_It happens that the sweet unfathomed sea
Of seeming courtesy sometimes doth hide
Offence to life and honour. This descried,
I hold less dear the health restored to me.
He who lends wings of hope, while secretly
He spreads a traitorous snare by the wayside,
Hath dulled the flame of love, and mortified
Friendship where friendship burns most fervently.
Keep then, my dear Luigi, clear and fare,
That ancient love to which my life I owe,
That neither wind nor storm its calm may mar.
For wrath and pain our gratitude obscure;