I want you in the Sistine Chapel.”  Accordingly Michael Angelo, who had already made cartoons for the “Last Judgment” in the life of Clement, once more laid aside the chisel and took up the brush.  For eight years, between 1534 and 1542, he laboured at the fresco above the high altar of the chapel, devoting his terrible genius to a subject worthy of the times in which he lived.  Since he had first listened while a youth to the prophecies of Savonarola, the woes announced in that apocalypse had all come true.  Italy had been scourged, Rome sacked, the Church chastised.  And yet the world had not grown wiser; vice was on the increase, virtue grew more rare.[326] It was impossible after the experience of the immediate past and within view of the present and the future, to conceive of God as other than an angry judge, vindictive and implacable.

The “Last Judgment” has long been the most celebrated of Michael Angelo’s paintings; partly no doubt because it was executed in the plenitude of his fame, with the eyes of all Italy upon him; partly because its size arouses vulgar wonder, and its theme strikes terror into all who gaze on it.  Yet it is neither so strong nor so beautiful as the vault-paintings of the Sistine.  The freshness of the genius that created Eve and Adam, unrivalled in their bloom of primal youth, has passed away.  Austerity and gloom have taken possession of the painter.  His style has hardened into mannerism, and the display of barren science in difficult posturing and strained anatomy has become wilful.  Still, whether we regard this fresco as closing the long series of “Last Judgments” to be studied on Italian church-walls from Giotto downwards; or whether we confine our attention, as contemporaries seem to have done, to the skill of its foreshortenings and groupings;[327] or whether we analyse the dramatic energy wherewith tremendous passions are expressed, its triumph is in either case decided.  The whole wall swarms with ascending and descending, poised and hovering, shapes—­men and women rising from the grave before the judge, taking their stations among the saved, or sinking with unutterable anguish to the place of doom—­a multitude that no man can number, surging to and fro in dim tempestuous air.  In the centre at the top, Christ is rising from His throne with the gesture of an angry Hercules, hurling ruin on the guilty.  He is such as the sins of Italy have made Him.  Squadrons of angels, bearing the emblems of His passion, whirl around Him like grey thunder-clouds, and all the saints lean forward from their vantage ground to curse and threaten.  At the very bottom bestial features take the place of human lineaments, and the terror of judgment has become the torment of damnation.  Such is the general scope of this picture.  Of all its merits, none is greater than the delineation of uncertainty and gradual awakening to life.  The middle region between vigilance and slumber, reality and dream, Michael Angelo ruled as his own realm; and a painting of the “Last Judgment” enabled him to deal with this metaichmios skotos—­this darkness in the interval of crossing spears—­under its most solemn aspect.