Vasari, in his description of the Last Judgment, seized upon what after all endures as the most salient aspect of this puzzling work, at once so fascinating and so repellent.  “It is obvious,” he says, “that the peerless painter did not aim at anything but the portrayal of the human body in perfect proportions and most varied attitudes, together with the passions and affections of the soul.  That was enough for him, and here he has no equal.  He wanted to exhibit the grand style:  consummate draughtsmanship in the nude, mastery over all problems of design.  He concentrated his power upon the human form, attending to that alone, and neglecting all subsidiary things, as charm of colour, capricious inventions, delicate devices and novelties of fancy.”  Vasari might have added that Michelangelo also neglected what ought to have been a main object of his art:  convincing eloquence, the solemnity proper to his theme, spirituality of earthly grossness quit.  As a collection of athletic nudes in all conceivable postures of rest and action, of foreshortening, of suggested movement, the Last Judgment remains a stupendous miracle.  Nor has the aged master lost his cunning for the portrayal of divinely simple faces, superb limbs, masculine beauty, in the ideal persons of young men.  The picture, when we dwell long enough upon its details, emerges into prominence, moreover, as indubitably awe-inspiring, terrifying, dreadful in its poignant expression of wrath, retaliation, thirst for vengeance, cruelty, and helpless horror.  But the supreme point even of Doomsday, of the Dies Irae, has not been seized.  We do not hear the still small voice of pathos and of human hope which thrills through Thomas a Celano’s hymn:—­

  Quaerens me sedisti lassus,
  Redemisti crucem passus: 
  Tantus labor non sit cassus.

The note is one of sustained menace and terror, and the total scheme of congregated forms might be compared to a sense-deafening solo on a trombone.  While saying this, we must remember that it was the constant impulse of Michelangelo to seize one moment only, and what he deemed the most decisive moment, in the theme he had to develop.  Having selected the instant of time at which Christ, half risen from his Judgment-seat of cloud, raises an omnific hand to curse, the master caused each fibre of his complex composition to thrill with the tremendous passion of that coming sentence.  The long series of designs for Crucifixions, Depositions from the Cross, and Pietas which we possess, all of them belonging to a period of his life not much later than 1541, prove that his nature was quite as sensitive to pathos as to terror; only, it was not in him to attempt a combination of terror and pathos.