When the fresco was uncovered, there arose a general murmur of disapprobation that the figures were all nude.  As society became more vicious, it grew nice.  Messer Biagio, the Pope’s master of the ceremonies, remarked that such things were more fit for stews and taverns than a chapel.  The angry painter placed his portrait in Hell with a mark of infamy that cast too lurid a light upon this prudish speech.  When Biagio complained, Paul wittily answered that, had it been Purgatory, he might have helped him, but in Hell is no redemption.  Even the foul-mouthed and foul-hearted Aretino wrote from Venice to the same effect—­a letter astounding for its impudence.[328] Michael Angelo made no defence.  Perhaps he reflected that the souls of the Pope himself and Messer Biagio and Messer Pietro Aretino would go forth one day naked to appear before the judge, with the deformities of sin upon them, as in Plato’s “Gorgias.”  He refused, however, to give clothes to his men and women.  Daniel da Volterra, who was afterwards employed to do this, got the name of breeches-maker.

We are hardly able to appreciate the “Last Judgment;” it has been so smirched and blackened by the smoke and dust of centuries.  And this is true of the whole Sistine Chapel.[329] Yet it is here that the genius of Michael Angelo in all its terribleness must still be studied.  In order to characterise the impression produced by even the less awful of these frescoes on a sympathetic student, I lay my pen aside and beg the reader to weigh what Henri Beyle, the versatile and brilliant critic, pencilled in the gallery of the Sistine Chapel on January 13, 1807:[330] “Greek sculpture was unwilling to reproduce the terrible in any shape; the Greeks had enough real troubles of their own.  Therefore, in the realm of art, nothing can be compared with the figure of the Eternal drawing forth the first man from nonentity.  The pose, the drawing, the drapery, all is striking:  the soul is agitated by sensations that are not usually communicated through the eyes.  When in our disastrous retreat from Russia, it chanced that we were suddenly awakened in the middle of the dark night by an obstinate cannonading, which at each moment seemed to gain in nearness, then all the forces of a man’s nature gathered close around his heart; he felt himself in the presence of fate, and, having no attention left for things of vulgar interest, he made himself ready to dispute his life with destiny.  The sight of Michael Angelo’s pictures has brought back to my consciousness that almost forgotten sensation.  Great souls enjoy their own greatness:  the rest of the world is seized with fear, and goes mad.”