ositions? Here comes in,
alongside of his almost automatic genius for shapes, the man's
superhuman constructive ingenuity. See how he divides that ceiling
in such a way that the frames of the separate compositions combine
into a huge structure of painted rafters and brackets, nay the
Prophets and Sibyls, the Ancestors and Ancestresses themselves,
and the naked antique genii, turn into architectural members,
holding that imaginary roof together, securing its seeming stability,
increasing, by their gesture its upspring and its weightiness, and at
the same time determining the tracks along which the eye is forced
to travel. Backwards and forwards the eye is driven by that living
architecture, round and round in its search now for completion of
visible pattern, now for symbolic and narrative meaning. And ever
back to the tale of the Creation, so that the remote historic incidents
of the Ancestors, the tremendous and tremendously present lyric
excitement and despair of the prophetic men and women, the pagan
suggestion of the athletic genii, all unite like the simultaneous and
consecutive harmonies of a titanic symphony, round the recurrent
and dominant phrases of those central stories of how the universe
and man were made, so that the beholder has the emotion of hearing
not one part of the Old Testament, but the whole of it. But
meanwhile, and similarly interchanging and multiplying their
imaginative and emotional appeal, the thought of those most
memorable of all written stories unites with the perception and
empathy of those marvellous systems of living lines and curves and
angles, throbbing with their immortal impacts and speeds and
directions in a great coordinated movement that always begins and
never ends, until it seems to the beholder as if those painted shapes
were themselves the crowning work of some eighth day of Creation,
gathering up in reposeful visible synthesis the whole of Creation's
ineffable energy and harmony and splendour.

This example of Michelangelo's ceiling shows how, thanks to the
rythmical nature of perception, art fulfils the mission of making us
think from Shapes to Things and from Things back to Shapes. And it
allows us to see the workings of that psychological law, already
manifest in the elementary relations of line to line and dot to dot, by
which whatever can be thought and felt in continuous alternation
tends to be turned into a whole by such reiteration of common
activities. And this me