ccio Pintelli lies? Or
who shall find the grave where the hand that carved the lovely marble
screen is laid at rest?

[Illustration: SIXTINE CHAPEL]

It is often dark in the Sixtine Chapel. The tourist can rarely choose
his day, and not often his hour, and, in the weary traveller's
hard-driven appreciation, Michelangelo may lose his effect by the
accident of a thunder shower. Yet of all sights in Rome, the Sixtine
Chapel most needs sunshine. If in any way possible, go there at noon on
a bright winter's day, when the sun is streaming in through the high
windows at the left of the 'Last Judgment.' Everyone has heard of the
picture before seeing it, and almost everybody is surprised or
disappointed on seeing it for the first time. Then, too, the world's
ideas about the terrific subject of the painting have changed since
Michelangelo's day. Religious belief can no more be judged by the
standard of realism. It is wiser to look at the fresco as a work of art
alone, as the most surprising masterpiece of a master draughtsman, and
as a marvellous piece of composition.

In the lower part of the picture, there is a woman rising from her grave
in a shroud. It has been suggested that Michelangelo meant to represent
by this figure the Renascence of Italy, still struggling with darkness.
The whole work brings the times before us. There is the Christian Heaven
above, and the heathen Styx below. Charon ferries the souls across the
dark stream; they are first judged by Minos, and Minos is a portrait of
a cardinal who had ventured to judge the rest of the picture before it
was finished. There is in the picture all the whirling confusion of
ideas which made that age terrible and beautiful by turns, devout and
unbelieving, strong and weak, scholarly upon a foundation of barbarism,
and most realistic when most religious. You may see the reflected
confusion in the puzzled faces of most tourists who look at the 'Last
Judgment' for the first time. A young American girl smiles vaguely at
it; an Englishman glares, expressionless, at it through an eyeglass,
with a sort of cold inquiry--'Oh! is that all?' he might say; a German
begins at Paradise at the upper left-hand corner, and works his way
through the details to hell below, at the right. But all are inwardly
disturbed, or puzzled, or profoundly interested, and when they go away
this is the great picture which, of all they have seen, they remember
with the most clearness.

And as Michelang