of the Capitoline buildings, and the continuation of the Palazzo Farnese—­works that either exist only in drawings or have been confused by later alterations—­it is enough here to mention the Sagrestia Nuova of S. Lorenzo and the cupola of S. Peter’s.  The sacristy may be looked on either as the masterpiece of a sculptor who required fit setting for his statues, or of an architect who designed statues to enhance the structure he had planned.  Both arts are used with equal ease, nor has the genius of Michael Angelo dealt more masterfully with the human frame than with the forms of Roman architecture in this chapel.  He seems to have paid no heed to classic precedent, and to have taken no pains to adapt the parts to the structural purpose of the building.  It was enough for him to create a wholly novel framework for the modern miracle of sculpture it enshrines, attending to such rules of composition as determine light and shade, and seeking by the slightness of mouldings and pilasters to enhance the terrible and massive forms that brood above the Medicean tombs.  The result is a product of picturesque and plastic art, as true to the Michaelangelesque spirit as the Temple of the Wingless Victory to that of Pheidias.  But where Michael Angelo achieved a triumph of boldness, lesser natures were betrayed into bizarrerie; and this chapel of the Medici, in spite of its grandiose simplicity, proved a stumbling-block to subsequent architects by encouraging them to despise propriety and violate the laws of structure.  The same may be said with even greater truth of the Laurentian Library and its staircase.  The false windows, repeated pillars, and barefaced aiming at effect, that mark the insincerity of the barocco style, are found here almost for the first time.

What S. Peter’s would have been, if Michael Angelo had lived to finish it, can be imagined from his plans and elevations still preserved.  It must always remain a matter of profound regret that his project was so far altered as to sacrifice the effect of the dome from the piazza.  This dome is Michael Angelo’s supreme achievement as an architect.  It not only preserves all that is majestic in the cupola of Brunelleschi; but it also avoids the defects of its avowed model, by securing the entrance of abundant light, and dilating the imagination with the sense of space to soar and float in.  It is the dome that makes S. Peter’s what it is—­the adequate symbol of the Church in an age that had abandoned mediaevalism and produced a new type of civility for the modern nations.  On the connection between the building of S. Peter’s and the Reformation I have touched already.[45] This mighty temple is the shrine of Catholicity, no longer cosmopolitan by right of spiritual empire, but secularised and limited to Latin races.  At the same time it represents the spirit of a period when the Popes still led the world as intellectual chiefs.  As the decree for its erection was the last act of the Papacy before