he Last Judgment from 1536 to
1541.[65]

While he was working at it probably in 1539 he fell from the scaffold
and injured himself seriously in the leg. Still he completed his immense
task by December 25, 1541, the day when the public was admitted to see
it.

No one of his works has been more diversely judged. Before considering
it at all, we should remember that it was the work of an old man between
sixty and sixty-six. The vitality which this "terrible" man still
possessed after a life of exhausting labours and troubles is, whatever
we may think of the work, something superhuman. The first thing which
strikes us in that colossal fresco twenty metres high and ten wide and
swarming with hundreds of figures, is order, reason and imperious will,
controlled and almost cold. The innumerable human bodies, a throng which
produces at first a sense of stifling discomfort, are gathered in a
dozen groups which balance each other and are all drawn along in a
dizzying whirl from right to left around the Christ.

If we turn to the drama itself we are overwhelmed by an impression of
brutal force. Force alone rules. There is no soul; nothing but
unreasoning physical force and the terror of it. The moment chosen is
terrible. Through the thunder of the trumpets blown to bursting by the
angels, the herculean Christ curses.

"Now there is no longer any time for pity or room for pardon."[66]

Before that implacable gesture which launches eternal death all the army
of gigantic bodies swerves and bows, a prey to one feeling--that of
fear; crushing, horrible fear relieved by no reasoning thought, a fear
of blows like that of a dog under the whip. The tremendous vigour of
these trembling athletes throws more harshly into relief their abject
helplessness. The martyrs in order to recall to the Master their claims
on His mercy exhibit servilely the instruments of their martyrdom. St.
Laurence covers himself with his gridiron; St. Blaise waves his rack;
St. Bartholomew holds out his bloody skin and lifts his bare knife with
such ferocity that he appears rather to be the flayer than the flayed.
The Virgin withdraws into the background so as not to see. Abel hides
behind Adam, and one of his sisters throws herself, terrified, on Eve's
knees and buries her face in the arms of her mother. The tempest howls
above. The heavy flight of angels rolls through space, head over heels,
bearing with an exaggerated and forced violence the column, the cross