The artist’s verse may be taken as a keynote to the solemn tragedy of the work.  In fact, the monuments are not really to Lorenzo and Giuliano, but to Florence, to “the great city which had struggled and erred so long, which had gone astray and repented, and suffered and erred again, but always mightily, with full tide of life in her veins and consciousness in her heart, until now the time had come when she was dead and past, chained down by icy oppression in a living grave."[34]

[Footnote 32:  Both translations are from Horners’ Walks in Florence.  Symonds has also translated the verses, but less literally.]

[Footnote 33:  Swinburne in his lines, “In San Lorenzo,” answers these lines, “Is thine hour come to waken, slumbering Night?”]

[Footnote 34:  This and the preceding quotations are from Mrs. Oliphant’s Makers of Florence.]

XV

CENTRAL FIGURES IN THE LAST JUDGMENT

There are in the Bible certain references to a great day when the Son of Man shall be seen “coming in the clouds with great power and glory.”  “And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other."[35] St. Paul, in a letter which he wrote to the Christians in Corinth, speaks of this as a “mystery,” and says:[36] “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump:  for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

[Footnote 35:  Matthew, chapter xxiv. verse 31.]

[Footnote 36:  1 Corinthians, chapter xv. verses 51, 52.]

In the Middle Ages these passages were interpreted very literally and had a great influence over the people.  At that time the Christian religion was a religion of fear rather than of love, and men were continually picturing in their minds God’s angry separation of the good from the wicked.

How much such thoughts occupied them we may see from Dante’s great poem describing a vision of the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.  This was written in the thirteenth century, and in the same period appeared a short Latin lyric, or hymn, called “Dies Irae,” or the Day of Wrath, from an expression used by the old Hebrew prophet Zephaniah.  The author was a Franciscan monk named Thomas of Celano, and we may see how deeply he felt from these verses:—­

    “Ah! what terror is impending
    When the Judge is seen descending,
    And each secret veil is rending.

    “To the throne, the trumpet sounding,
    Through the sepulchres resounding,
    Summons all, with voice astounding.

    “Sits the Judge, the raised arraigning,
    Darkest mysteries explaining,
    Nothing unavenged remaining.”

This vivid word picture forms the subject of many great paintings by the older Italian masters, known under the title of the Last Judgment.  Michelangelo’s was one of the last of these, and in general arrangement his composition resembles those of his predecessors.