Michael Angelo was greater as an architect and a sculptor than as a painter, because his power and delight lay in the mastery of form, and in the assertion, through that mastery, of the idealism of genius. It is not necessary to speak here of the mighty harmonies and the ineffable dignity of simplicity, somewhat marred by the departure from Michael Angelo's designs, in St Peter's. It has been the fashion to praise them to the skies, and it has been a later fashion to decry them, in awarding a preference to the solemn shades and the dim rich dreaminess of Gothic architecture. Both fashions come to this, after all, that beauty, like these great men of genius of old, is many-sided.
In Michael Angelo's works of sculpture a weird charm attaches to his monuments in honour of the Medici in the chapel of San Lorenzo, Florence. Perhaps something of this weirdness has to do with the tragic history of the men, and with a certain mystery which has always shrouded the sculptor's meaning in these monuments.
Mrs Jameson quotes an account of Michael Angelo at work. 'An eye-witness has left us a very graphic description of the energy with which, even in old age, Michael Angelo handled his chisel:—"I can say that I have seen Michael Angelo at the age of sixty, and, with a body announcing weakness, make more chips of marble fly about in a quarter of an hour than would three of the strongest young sculptors in an hour,—a thing almost incredible to him who has not beheld it. He went to work with such impetuosity and fury of manner, that I feared almost every moment to see the block split into pieces. It would seem as if, inflamed by the idea of greatness which inspired him, this great man attacked with a species of fury the marble which concealed the Statue."'—Blaise de Vigenére.
In painting Michael Angelo regarded colouring as of secondary importance. He is not known to have executed one painting in oil, and he treated oil and easel-painting generally as work only fit for women or idle men. While he approached the sublime in his painting, it was by no means faultless. Even in form his efforts were apt to tend to heaviness and exaggeration, and the fascination which robust muscular delineation had for him, betrayed him into materialism. Fuseli's criticism of Michael Angelo's work, that Michael Angelo's women were female men, and his children diminutive giants, is judged correct. Incomparably the greatest painting of Michael Angelo's is his ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It includes upwards of 200 figures, the greater part colossal, as they were to be looked at, in the distance, from below.
'The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel contains the most perfect works done by Michael Angelo in his long and active life. Here his great spirit appears in noblest dignity, in its highest purity; here the attention is not disturbed by that arbitrary display to which his great power not unfrequently seduced him in other works. The ceiling forms a flattened arch in its section; the central portion, which is a plain surface, contains a series of large and small pictures, representing the most important events recorded in the book of Genesis—the Creation and Fall of Man, with its immediate consequences. In the large triangular compartments at the springing of the vault are sitting figures of the Prophets and Sibyls, as the
foretellers of the coming Saviour. In the soffits of the recesses between these compartments, and in the arches underneath, immediately above the windows, are the ancestors of the Virgin, the series leading the mind directly to the Saviour. The external of these numerous representations is formed by an architectural frame-work of peculiar composition, which encloses the single subjects, tends to make the principal masses conspicuous, and gives to the whole an appearance of that solidity and support so necessary, but so seldom attended to in soffit decorations, which may be considered as if suspended. A great number of figures are also connected with the framework; those in unimportant situations are executed in the colour of stone or bronze; in the more important, in natural colours. These serve to support the architectural forms, to fill up and to connect the whole. They may be best described as the living and embodied genii of architecture. It required the unlimited power of an architect, sculptor, and painter, to conceive a structural whole of so much grandeur,
to design the decorative figures with the significant repose required by the sculpturesque character, and yet to preserve their subordination to the principal subjects, and to keep the latter in the proportions and relations best adapted to the space to be filled.'—Kugler.
The pictures from the Old Testament, beginning from the altar, are:—
1. The Separation of Light and Darkness.
2. The Creation of the Sun and Moon.
3. The Creation of Trees and Plants.
4. The Creation of Adam.
5. The Creation of Eve.
6. The Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise.
7. The Sacrifice of Noah.
8. The Deluge.
9. The Intoxication of Noah.
'The scenes from Genesis are the most sublime representations of these subjects;—the Creating Spirit is unveiled before us. The peculiar type which the painter has here given of the form of the Almighty