, could
we dream of anything more marvellously beautiful than his "Adam" awaking
for the first time to light? or more chaste, more graceful, more touching
than his young "Eve" leaning toward her Creator, and breathing in through
her half-opened lips the divine breath that is giving her life?

What is the meaning of this terrible work? What means this long evolution
of human destiny? Why did these two beings that we see beautiful and
happy in the beginning, why did they people the earth with this ardent,
restless, at once gigantic and powerless race? Ah! Greece would have made
this ceiling an Olympus, inhabited by happy and divine men! Michelangelo
put there great unhappy beings, and this painful poem of humanity
is truer than the wondrous fictions of ancient poetry and art.
"Michelangelo," says Condivi, "especially admired Dante. He also devoted
himself earnestly to the reading of the Scriptures and the writings of
Savonarola, for whom he had always great affection, having preserved in
his mind the memory of his powerful voice." Besides, the country of the
great Florentine, the glorious Italy of the Renaissance, was in a state
of dissolution. Such studies, such reminiscences, such and so sad
realities, may explain the visions that passed through the mind of the
great artist during the four years of almost complete solitude he passed
in the Sistine. The precise meaning of these compositions will probably
never be known, but so long as men exist they will, as is the object of
art, attract minds toward the dim world of the ideal.

The year that followed the opening of the Sistine, and which preceded the
death of Julius, appears, as do the first two of Leo X's pontificate, to
have been the happiest and calmest of Michelangelo's life. The old Pope
loved him, "showing him," says Condivi, "attentions he showed no other
of those who approached him." He honored his probity, and even that
independence of character of which he himself had more than once had
experience; Michelangelo, on his side, forgave him his frequent outbursts
of impetuosity, that were ever atoned for by prompt and complete
acknowledgment.

Michelangelo's sight, greatly enfeebled by this persistent work of four
years, compelled him to take almost absolute repose. "The necessity he
was under," says Vasari, "during this period of work of keeping his eyes
turned upward, had so weakened his sight that for several months after he
could not look at a drawing nor re