stere figure is far from attaining or
pretending to the serene and tranquil beauty which the ancients regarded
as the supreme term of art, whence is it that it produces upon the most
prejudiced mind an irresistible impression? It is that it is more than
human, that it lifts the soul into a world of feelings and ideas of which
the ancients knew less than we do. Their voluptuous art, in deifying
the human form, held down thought to earth. The "Moses" of Michelangelo
beheld God, heard that voice of thunder, and bears the terrible impress
of what he saw and heard on Mount Sinai: his profound eye is scrutinizing
the mysteries he vaguely sees in his prophetic dreams. Is it the Moses of
the Bible? I cannot say. Is it in this way Praxiteles and Phidias
would have represented Lycurgus and Solon? We may deny it boldly. The
legislators in their hands would have been the embodiment of law; they
would have represented an abstraction in a form whose harmonious beauty
nothing could alter. Moses is not merely the legislator of a people. Not
thought alone dwells beneath this powerful brow; he feels, he suffers,
he lives in a moral world which Jehovah has opened to him, and, although
above humanity, is a man.

On his return to Rome in 1508, Michelangelo had found Julius II not
cooled toward him, but preoccupied by new projects. The Pope made no
allusion to his monument, and was absorbed in the reconstruction of St.
Peter's, which he had confided to Bramante. Raphael was beginning at the
same time the frescoes of the Stanza della Segnatura; and two biographers
of Michelangelo, whose testimony, it is true, on this point may be
suspected, agree in saying that the architect of St. Peter's, jealous
of the superiority of the Florentine sculptor, fearing lest he should
discover the mistakes committed in his recent constructions, and the
malversations of which perhaps he was not innocent, advised the Pope to
confide to him the painting of the ceiling of the chapel built by Sixtus
IV, hoping to compromise and ruin him by engaging him in works of which
he had no experience.

Julius adopted the idea, sent for Michelangelo, and ordered him to begin
forthwith. Buonarroti had had no practice in fresco-painting since his
student days under Ghirlandajo. He knew that the painting of a ceiling
was not an easy matter. He pleaded every excuse, proposed that the
commission should be given to Raphael, saying that for his part, being
but a sculptor, he could