Postponing descriptive or aesthetic criticism of the Sistine frescoes, I shall proceed with the narration of their gradual completion.  We have few documents to guide us through the period of time which elapsed between the first uncovering of Michelangelo’s work on the roof of the Sistine (November 1, 1509) and its ultimate accomplishment (October 1512).  His domestic correspondence is abundant, and will be used in its proper place; but nothing transpires from those pages of affection, anger, and financial negotiation to throw light upon the working of the master’s mind while he was busied in creating the sibyls and prophets, the episodes and idyls, which carried his great Bible of the Fate of Man downwards through the vaulting to a point at which the Last Judgment had to be presented as a crowning climax.  For, the anxious student of his mind and life-work, nothing is more desolating than the impassive silence he maintains about his doings as an artist.  He might have told us all we want to know, and never shall know here about them.  But while he revealed his personal temperament and his passions with singular frankness, he locked up the secret of his art, and said nothing.

Eventually we must endeavour to grasp Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine as a whole, although it was carried out at distant epochs of his life.  For this reason I have thrown these sentences forward, in order to embrace a wide span of his artistic energy (from May 10, 1508, to perhaps December 1541).  There is, to my mind, a unity of conception between the history depicted on the vault, the prophets and forecomers on the pendentives, the types selected for the spandrels, and the final spectacle of the day of doom.  Living, as he needs must do, under the category of time, Michelangelo was unable to execute his stupendous picture-book of human destiny in one sustained manner.  Years passed over him of thwarted endeavour and distracted energies—­years of quarrying and sculpturing, of engineering and obeying the vagaries of successive Popes.  Therefore, when he came at last to paint the Last Judgment, he was a worn man, exhausted in services of many divers sorts.  And, what is most perplexing to the reconstructive critic, nothing in his correspondence remains to indicate the stages of his labour.  The letters tell plenty about domestic anxieties, annoyances in his poor craftsman’s household, purchases of farms, indignant remonstrances with stupid brethren; but we find in them, as I have said, no clue to guide us through that mental labyrinth in which the supreme artist was continually walking, and at the end of which he left to us the Sistine as it now is.

VII