What I have called Michelangelo’s third manner, the purest manifestation of which is to be found in the vault of the Sistine, sustained itself for a period of many years.  The surviving fragments of sculpture for the tomb of Julius, especially the Captives of the Louvre and the statues in the Sacristy at S. Lorenzo, belong to this stage.  A close and intimate rapport with Nature can be perceived in all the work he designed and executed during the pontificates of Leo and Clement.  The artist was at his fullest both of mental energy and physical vigour.  What he wrought now bears witness to his plenitude of manhood.  Therefore, although the type fixed for the Sistine prevailed—­I mean that generalisation of the human form in certain wilfully selected proportions, conceived to be ideally beautiful or necessary for the grand style in vast architectonic schemes of decoration—­still it is used with an exquisite sensitiveness to the pose and structure of the natural body, a delicate tact in the definition of muscle and articulation, an acute feeling for the qualities of flesh and texture.  None of the creations of this period, moreover, are devoid of intense animating emotions and ideas.

Unluckily, during all the years which intervened between the Sistine vault and the Last Judgment, Michelangelo was employed upon architectural problems and engineering projects, which occupied his genius in regions far removed from that of figurative art.  It may, therefore, be asserted, that although he did not retrograde from want of practice, he had no opportunity of advancing further by the concentration of his genius on design.  This accounts, I think, for the change in his manner which we notice when he began to paint in Rome under Pope Paul III.  The fourth stage in his development of form is reached now.  He has lost nothing of his vigour, nothing of his science.  But he has drifted away from Nature.  All the innumerable figures of the Last Judgment, in all their varied attitudes, with divers moods of dramatic expression, are diagrams wrought out imaginatively from the stored-up resources of a lifetime.  It may be argued that it was impossible to pose models, in other words, to appeal to living men and women, for the foreshortenings of falling or soaring shapes in that huge drift of human beings.  This is true; and the strongest testimony to the colossal powers of observation possessed by Michelangelo is that none of all those attitudes are wrong.  We may verify them, if we take particular pains to do so, by training the sense of seeing to play the part of a detective camera.  Michelangelo was gifted with a unique faculty for seizing momentary movements, fixing them upon his memory, and transferring them to fresco by means of his supreme acquaintance with the bony structure and the muscular capacities of the human frame.  Regarded from this point of view, the Last Judgment was an unparalleled success.  As such the contemporaries of Buonarroti hailed it.