In the above translation of Varchi’s peroration I have endeavoured to sustain those long-winded periods of which he was so perfect and professed a master.  We must remember that he actually read this dissertation before the Florentine Academy on the second Sunday in Lent, in the year 1546, when Michelangelo was still alive and hearty.  He afterwards sent it to the press; and the studied trumpet-tones of eulogy, conferring upon Michelangelo the quintuple crown of pre-eminence in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and loving, sounded from Venice down to Naples.  The style of the oration may strike us as rococo now, but the accent of praise and appreciation is surely genuine.  Varchi’s enthusiastic comment on the sonnets xxx, xxxi, and lii, published to men of letters, taste, and learning in Florence and all Italy, is the strongest vindication of their innocence against editors and scholars who in various ways have attempted to disfigure or to misconstrue them.

CHAPTER XIII

I

The correspondence which I used in the eleventh chapter, while describing Michelangelo’s difficulties regarding the final contract with the Duke of Urbino, proves that he had not begun to paint the frescoes of the Cappella Paolina in October 1542.  They were carried on with interruptions during the next seven years.  These pictures, the last on which his talents were employed, are two large subjects:  the Conversion of S. Paul, and the Martyrdom of S. Peter.  They have suffered from smoke and other injuries of time even more than the frescoes of the Sistine, and can now be scarcely appreciated owing to discoloration.  Nevertheless, at no period, even when fresh from the master’s hand, can they have been typical of his style.  It is true that contemporaries were not of this opinion.  Condivi calls both of them “stupendous not only in the general exposition of the histories but also in the details of each figure.”  It is also true that the technical finish of these large compositions shows a perfect mastery of painting, and that the great designer has not lost his power of dealing at will with the human body.  But the frigidity of old age had fallen on his feeling and imagination.  The faces of his saints and angels here are more inexpressive than those of the Last Judgment.  The type of form has become still more rigidly schematic.  All those figures in violent attitudes have been invented in the artist’s brain without reference to nature; and the activity of movement which he means to suggest, is frozen, petrified, suspended.  The suppleness, the elasticity, the sympathy with which Michelangelo handled the nude, when he began to paint in the Sistine Chapel, have disappeared.  We cannot refrain from regretting that seven years of his energetic old age should have been devoted to work so obviously indicative of decaying faculties.