The two planes which I have attempted to describe occupy the upper and the larger portion of the composition.  The third in order is made up of three masses.  In the middle floats a band of Titanic cherubs, blowing their long trumpets over earth and sea to wake the dead.  Dramatically, nothing can be finer than the strained energy and superhuman force of these superb creatures.  Their attitudes compel our imagination to hear the crashing thunders of the trump of doom.  To the left of the spectator are souls ascending to be judged, some floating through vague ether, enwrapped with grave-clothes, others assisted by descending saints and angels, who reach a hand, a rosary, to help the still gross spirit in its flight.  To the right are the condemned, sinking downwards to their place of torment, spurned by seraphs, cuffed by angelic grooms, dragged by demons, hurling, howling, huddled in a mass of horror.  It is just here, and still yet farther down, that Michelangelo put forth all his power as a master of expression.  While the blessed display nothing which is truly proper to their state of holiness and everlasting peace, the damned appear in every realistic aspect of most stringent agony and terror.  The colossal forms of flesh with which the multitudes of saved and damned are equally endowed, befit that extremity of physical and mental anguish more than they suit the serenity of bliss eternal.  There is a wretch, twined round with fiends, gazing straight before him as he sinks; one half of his face is buried in his hand, the other fixed in a stony spasm of despair, foreshadowing perpetuity of hell.  Nothing could express with sublimity of a higher order the sense of irremediable loss, eternal pain, a future endless without hope, than the rigid dignity of this not ignoble sinner’s dread.  Just below is the place to which the doomed are sinking.  Michelangelo reverted to Dante for the symbolism chosen to portray hell.  Charon, the demon, with eyes of burning coal, compels a crowd of spirits in his ferryboat.  They land and are received by devils, who drag them before Minos, judge of the infernal regions.  He towers at the extreme right end of the fresco, indicating that the nether regions yawn infinitely deep, beyond our ken; just as the angels above Christ suggest a region of light and glory, extending upward through illimitable space.  The scene of judgment on which attention is concentrated forms but an episode in the universal, sempiternal scheme of things.  Balancing hell, on the left hand of the spectator, is brute earth, the grave, the forming and the swallowing clay, out of which souls, not yet acquitted or condemned, emerge with difficulty, in varied forms of skeletons or corpses, slowly thawing into life eternal.