No one but Michael Angelo could have done what he did in the Sistine Chapel.  The conception was entirely his own.  The execution, except in subordinate details and in matters pertaining to the mason’s craft, was also his.  The rapidity with which he laboured was astounding.  Mr. Heath Wilson infers from the condition of the plaster and the joinings observable in different parts, that the figure of Adam, highly finished as it is, was painted in three days.  Nor need we strip the romance from that time-honoured tale of the great master’s solitude.  Lying on his back beneath the dreary vault, communing with Dante, Savonarola, and the Hebrew prophets in the intervals of labour, locking up the chapel-doors in order to elude the jealous curiosity of rivals, eating but little and scarcely sleeping, he accomplished in sixteen months the first part of his gigantic task.[317] From time to time Julius climbed the scaffold and inspected the painter’s progress.  Dreading lest death should come before the work were finished, he kept crying, “When will you make an end?” “When I can,” answered the painter.  “You seem to want,” rejoined the petulant old man, “that I should have you thrown down from the scaffold.”  Then Michael Angelo’s brush stopped.  The machinery was removed, and the frescoes were uncovered in their incompleteness to the eyes of Rome.

Entering the Cappella Sistina, and raising our eyes to sweep the roof, we have above us a long and somewhat narrow oblong space, vaulted with round arches, and covered from end to end, from side to side, with a network of human forms.  The whole is coloured like the dusky, tawny, blueish clouds of thunderstorms.  There is no luxury of decorative art;—­no gold, no paint-box of vermilion or emerald green, has been lavished here.  Sombre and aerial, like shapes condensed from vapour, or dreams begotten by Ixion upon mists of eve or dawn, the phantoms evoked by the sculptor throng that space.  Nine compositions, carrying down the sacred history from the creation of light to the beginning of sin in Noah’s household, fill the central compartments of the roof.  Beneath these, seated on the spandrils, are alternate prophets and sibyls, twelve in all, attesting to the future deliverance and judgment of the world by Christ.  The intermediate spaces between these larger masses, on the roof and in the lunettes of the windows, swarm with figures, some naked and some draped—­women and children, boys and young men, grouped in tranquil attitudes, or adapting themselves with freedom to their station on the curves and angles of the architecture.  In these subordinate creations Michael Angelo deigned to drop the terrible style, in order that he might show how sweet and full of charm his art could be.  The grace of colouring, realised in some of those youthful and athletic forms, is such as no copy can represent.  Every posture of beauty and of strength, simple or strained, that it is possible for men to assume, has been depicted here.  Yet the whole is governed by a strict sense of sobriety.  The restlessness of Correggio, the violent attitudinising of Tintoretto, belong alike to another and less noble spirit.