"Your Michael Angelo, Sculptor, in Rome."[117]
The following note tells of the end of the work:
"I have finished the Chapel which I painted. The Pope is very well satisfied, but other things do not happen as I wished. Lay blame on the times, which are unfavourable to art." It is a note by Michael Angelo in the Buonarroto manuscripts of the British Museum, but undated. It is probably of October 1512, and marks the close of this period of enormous work. The decoration of the Sistine Chapel now consisted, firstly, on the flat of the vault, of Michael Angelo's history of the Creation and the Fall of Man, of the Punishment of the Flood, [pg 166]and the Second Entry of Sin into the World; secondly, on the pendentives, of the Prophets and Sibyls proclaiming the coming of a Redeemer; and thirdly, of the Ancestors of Christ, filling the arches of the windows and the arches on the two end walls. Those on the altar wall are now covered by angels bearing the instruments of the Passion of Christ, parts of the great fresco of the Last Judgment, finished by Michael Angelo thirty years afterwards. At Oxford there are two drawings after these two destroyed frescoes of the Ancestors of Christ series. Fourthly, at the four corners the four great Deliverances of the Chosen People, emblems of the Redemption; fifthly, below, between the windows, a row of the figures of the Popes by Sandro Botticelli and others; these are still in existence, except the three that were on the wall of the high altar, now occupied by the Last Judgment. They were the earliest of the Popes, St. Peter probably in the centre. Lastly, below again, the great series of frescoes of the History of Christ and the History of Moses by Sandro Botticelli, Domenico del Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, Pietro Perugino, Bernardino Pintoricchio, Luca Signorelli, and Bartolomeo della Gatta. This splendid series forms a worthy predella to the epic work of Michael Angelo above; that they are worthy the one of the other is the highest compliment that can be paid to either. These stories well repay prolonged study, and help to keep our mind fresh to enjoy the idea of the advance Michael Angelo made in the art of painting. It is very instructive to compare his work with these frescoes of men who were almost his contemporaries. Above the altar three of this series were destroyed to make way for the Last Judgment; they were all three by Perugino, and represented the Assumption of the Virgin in the centre, the Nativity [pg 167]on the right, and the finding of Moses on the left. At the opposite end, over the great door, were two pictures by Domenico del Ghirlandaio, representing the Resurrection of Christ, and Michael contending with Satan for the Body of Moses, completing the series of the lives of the Redeemer and of his prototype in the Old Testament: Moses, the Deliverer. These last two works were destroyed for the ridiculous caricatures of Arrigo Fiammingo and Mattei da Lecce. Ultimately the Tapestry woven after the cartoons by Raphael, now at South Kensington Museum, completed the cycle of decoration down to the ground level.
THE PROPHET EZEKIEL
SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME
(By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence)
When Pope Julius prevented Michael Angelo from going on with his beloved project of the Tomb and made him paint the vault, the master set to work to produce a similar conception to the Tomb in a painted form. The vault became a great temple of painted marble and painted sculptures raised in mid-air above the walls of the chapel. The cornices and pilasters are of simple Renaissance architecture, the only ornaments he allowed himself to use being similar to those he would have used as a sculptor. Acorns, the family device of the della Rovere, rams' skulls, and scallop shells, and the one theme of decoration that Michael Angelo always delighted in—the human figure. The Prophets and Sibyls took the positions occupied by the principal figures designed for the Tomb, like the great statue of Moses. The Athletes at the corner of the ribs of the roof were in place of the bound captives, two of which are now in the Louvre, and the nine histories of the Creation and the Flood fill the panels like the bronze reliefs of the Tomb. The detail and completeness of this fresco are the best refutation of the [pg 168]frequent criticism that Michael Angelo did not finish his work. The fact is, that he finished more than any one. Had Michael Angelo done no work but this vault of the Sistine Chapel, it would have represented an output equal in quantity alone to that of the most prolific of his brother Italian artists. It is veritably a large picture-gallery of his works in itself. An idea of its numerical magnitude may be got by dividing it up into its component units and making an inventory of them. The vault itself, according to Heath Wilson, is one hundred and thirty-one feet six inches long, by forty-five feet two and a half inches wide at the large door end, and forty-three feet two and a half inches at the altar end, an area of nearly six thousand square feet, which apparently does not represent the arch measurement but only the plane covered by the arch, nor does it take account of the triangular and semicircular spaces above the windows. This vast surface is divided into:—
Four large pictures stretching over more than one-third of the width of the roof, and containing from five to more than forty-five figures, some of them twelve feet in height.
Five pictures, half the size of the last, with from one to eight figures in each.