e all, too, engaged in
noble works; charity, energy, and inventiveness are amongst the virtues
they exhibit; there is no panic, or struggling one with another; no anger
or selfishness, excepting only in the boat in the middle distance; a woman
helps her children, a man his wife, an old man bears a young man in his
arms, Priam carrying AEneas, an even more pathetic imagination than
Homer's; others attempt to save their household goods; others erect a
tent; others, again, attempt to scale the sides of the ark or break into
it with axes--one cannot but hope they will succeed. The female figures are
especially beautiful in this picture, and again we have a foretaste of
that wonderful modelling of the flank and thigh seen to perfection in the
tombs at San Lorenzo. The weird sea and sky, the ark and the dead tree,
show what Michael Angelo could do when he liked, in departments of art
other than the human figure. The individual figures in the Deluge are
difficult to see on account of the smallness of scale in this part of the
vault. It must have been after seeing them from the floor of the chapel,
by removing some of the boards of his scaffolding, that Michael Angelo
determined to alter the scale in the remaining compositions. In no other
way can we account for the change in the size of the Athletes, at any
rate. The difference of scale between those surrounding the Sin of Ham
over the large door, and those surrounding the separation of Light from
Darkness over the High Altar, must be almost two feet. The increase is
gradual along the ceiling. Similarly the Sybilla Delphica is very much
smaller than the Sybilla Lybica, and the Prophet Joel than the Prophet
Jeremiah. The last composition of this series--a small one--represents the
Sin of Ham, and was the first painted. The vat and the wine jug are
wonderful still-life, reminding us of Bassano.

[Image #29]

THE FLOOD

A DETAIL, SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME
(_Reproduced by permission from a photograph by Sig. D. Anderson, Rome_)

The twenty Athletes that decorate the corners of these central
compositions, and support bronze medallions held in place by oak garlands
or by draperies, are nothing but the most direct of transcripts from the
nude model, but the most noble that have been executed in the art of
painting. They are finished to the smallest detail, and are as truthful to
nature as it was poss