strong, calm and scornful; Delphica,
the virgin with the lovely body and fierce eyes; Daniel, his lips
compressed, his eyes fixed; Isaiah, bitter and contemptuous; Ezekiel, at
war with himself and with a Genius of sombre beauty who seems to be
pointing out to him the one who is to come; Jeremiah, plunged in the
depths of silence, and Jonah, panting and breathless, cast out from the
jaws of death--all those tragic torches of thought which burned in the
night of the pagan and Jewish world; all the human knowledge which
awaited the Saviour.

Above the twelve windows the Precursors and Ancestors of Christ also
wait and dream in the midst of the storm. The night is long and full of
evil visions. They try to sleep, they try to forget how long they must
wait; they are silent and they ponder, anxious and overwhelmed. A seated
woman alone dares to look squarely in the face of the menacing future.
In her fixed and dilated eyes I can see that secret feeling which weighs
on all these beings, a burden they dare not acknowledge--fear. At the
four angles of the ceiling are displayed the sinister acts which saved
the people of God--David slaying Goliath, Judith bearing the head of
Holofernes, the Hebrews writhing under the bites of the serpents of
Moses, and Haman crucified. Fierce barbaric stories of murderous
fanaticism--a roundhead in Cromwell's time would have chosen no other
subjects.

Fear, sadness, suspense. We who know how thirty years later Michelangelo
completed with the Last Judgment the cycle of his idea, we know what
they awaited--the Christ who comes to destroy.

Michelangelo had suffered terribly during this gigantic labour. His
letters show intense discouragement which even his wonderful visions
could not help. "This is not my profession," he complained. "I waste my
time without any results. God help me."[28]

These were years of desperate efforts in the midst of enemies who spied
upon him and hoped for his failure. He nearly gave up the work and fled
again. Just as he began to paint the Deluge the whole ceiling began to
grow mouldy so that the figures could hardly be distinguished.
Michelangelo seized that as an excuse for giving up, but San Gallo
discovered that the trouble came from the lime, which had too much water
in it, and the pope ordered the artist to go on with his work.

Julius II was irritated by Michelangelo's slowness and by the fact that
he persisted in hiding his work from him. There was constant