THE LAST JUDGMENT
In 1534 Michelangelo left Florence for the last time. His proud and independent spirit was unable to tolerate Alessandro's petty tyranny. The unfinished bust of Brutus, now in the Bargello, a vigorous and striking piece of work, is another proof of his intense longing for liberty. On arriving in Rome he found that Clement VII. had died two days previously, and that Paul III., Farnese, had been elected Pope.
Michelangelo had finally come to an understanding with the executors of Julius II., the agreement being that he should make a tomb with one façade only, using the marbles already carved for the quadrangular tomb and supplying six statues from his own hand, the rest of the work to be completed by other artists under his supervision. He therefore hoped to finish the tomb which had embittered thirty years of his life, but once more he was doomed to disappointment, for Paul III. immediately appointed him chief architect, sculptor and painter of the Vatican, with a pension of 1,200 golden crowns, and ordered him to carry out a commission which Clement VII. had given him shortly before his death. It was no less a task than to paint the end wall of the Sistine Chapel. Prayers and remonstrance were alike unavailing, and the doors of the Sistine closed once more upon the master, not to be opened again until the Christmas of 1541, when his Last Judgment was uncovered "to the admiration of Rome and of the whole world."
Thirty years earlier Michelangelo had depicted the Creation on the vault of this same chapel; he now took for his subject the final doom of all things created. The colossal work which cost him eight years' labour is a magnificent but almost terrifying pictorial rendering of the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath, when "even the just shall not feel secure." Awe and terror are equally apparent among the spirits of the blessed crowding round the dread Judge, and on the despairing countenances of the condemned souls dragged down by hideous demons towards the infernal river, where Charon in his boat "beckons to them with eyes of fire and beats the delaying souls with uplifted oar." The rendering of the subject is thoroughly Dantesque, and very different from the conventional treatment of the same theme by all preceding artists. The composition, however, and indeed several individual groups and figures, remind us forcibly of the Campo Santo at Pisa.
Although all true artists received this work with enthusiasm, as Vasari says, and came from every part of Italy to study it, Michelangelo's enemies, including Pietro Aretino, the most immoral writer of his age, criticised it as a highly improper painting, because most of the figures were nude. So incensed was Michelangelo at this that he revenged himself by painting one of his critics, Messer Biagio da Cesena, as Minos surrounded by a crowd of devils. Some years later Paul IV. obtained Michelangelo's consent to partly drape most of the figures, and the work was done with commendable discretion by Daniele da Volterra, who thereby earned the nickname of Il Braghettone, or the breeches-maker.
Unfortunately the smoke from the altar candles and censers, and the dust of centuries have darkened and almost completely destroyed the original colour of this fresco; ominous cracks have also appeared in several places, but it is to be hoped that time will spare one of the greatest masterpieces of modern art for many centuries to come.
No sooner had Michelangelo finished the Last Judgment, than Paul III. set him to work on the side walls of the chapel which Antonio da San Gallo had just completed, and which is now known as the Cappella Paolina. Michelangelo was nearly seventy years old at this time, and fresco painting over a large surface is a fatiguing task even for a young man, but the veteran artist obeyed, and in 1549 he completed what was to be his last pictorial work, the two frescoes representing the Conversion of St. Paul and the Martyrdom of St. Peter.
The composition of these pictures is as masterly as ever, and the drawing, especially in the fore-shortened figures, faultless, but for the first time we are aware of something cold and unnatural, very different from the glorious life and power with which the frescoes of the Sistine literally glow. Michelangelo was getting old, and even his Titanic frame could not withstand the insidious attacks of time. He was seventy-five years of age when he carried these frescoes to completion, and he himself confessed to Vasari that he did so "with great effort and fatigue." Nevertheless he found sufficient time and strength to complete the famous monument of Pope Julius II. during the intervals of his fresco painting, and in 1545 the tragedy of the tomb finally came to an end.
It must have been with feelings of mingled relief and bitterness that Michelangelo surveyed the much modified tomb in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. The mighty design which had fired his youthful ambition forty years previously had dwindled down to a comparatively unimposing monument, but everybody will agree with Condivi when he says that "although botched and patched up, it is the most worthy monument to be found in Rome, or perhaps in the world; if for nothing else, at least for the three statues that are by the hand of the master." Of the central figure, representing Moses, we shall have occasion to speak later on; the remaining statues by Michelangelo to which Condivi alludes are two female figures of rare beauty, representing Active and Contemplative Life. The rest of the tomb was finished by Raffaello da Montelupo and by other assistants under the master's supervision.
Having, as best he could, fulfilled his sacred pledge to the memory of Julius II., Michelangelo appeared to consider his artistic career as practically at an end. He was always inclined to sadness, but a cloud of deeper melancholy seemed to settle over him, and like Titian, Tintoretto, and other artists who attained to great old age, he turned his thoughts almost exclusively to religious speculation. In one of his sonnets he beautifully expresses the yearning for peace and rest which had taken possession of his storm-tossed soul: