te this brutal force or abandon yourself
to it without resistance like those souls of Dante whirled along by an
eternal cyclone. When we realise that that hell was for four years the
very soul of Michelangelo we understand why his life was burnt out by it
and why for a long time afterward he remained like a soil exhausted by
too much use and no longer productive. Above that ceiling and those
vaults built up of huge bodies, where tumultuous confusion and powerful
unity combine to evoke the monstrous dream of a Hindu and the imperious
logic and iron will of ancient Rome, there blooms a beauty that is
natural and pure. There has never been anything like it. It is at once
both bestial and divine, the exquisite perfume of Hellenic grace mingles
with the savage odour of primitive humanity. These giants with their
Olympian shoulders and huge thighs and loins wherein we feel, as the
sculptor Guillaume said, "the weight of heavy entrails" are as yet
hardly free from their double origin, their two progenitors, the beast
and the god. A series of drawings at Oxford University shows in what
springs of realism the genius of Michelangelo bathed itself and of what
common clay his heroes are moulded.

[Illustration: THE PROPHET EZEKIEL

Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.]

On the flat part of the vault, in the centre, are the nine scenes from
Genesis, AEschylean visions:[27] the divine solitude, the dreadful moment
of the creation, the athletic god carried by clouds of spirits, man just
rousing from the sleep of earth and regarding as an equal, face to face,
the God who awakes him--both in silent readiness for the struggle--the
calm and powerful woman in whom sleeps humanity--those human frames like
temples of flesh and blood, torsos like trunks of trees, arms like
columns and great thighs; those beings great with power and passion and
crime and the results and punishments of their crimes--the Temptation,
Cain and the Deluge.

At the angles of the cornice which frames these scenes are the twenty
savage Ignudi, living statues, either struggling in convulsions of fear
and fury or falling back, overwhelmed and exhausted--a symphony of mad
force which sweeps in every direction and beats against the walls.

As gigantic supporters of the ceilings are seated in the pendentives
twelve prophets and sibyls who suffer and dream; disdainful Lybica;
Persica, purblind and restless; Cumaea, with huge arms and pendent
breasts; the beautiful Erythraea,