Michelangelo had not been long in Rome before Pope Julius entrusted to him the task of executing a sepulchral monument to be completed during his lifetime. The design being approved, the artist spent the winter of 1505-1506 at the quarries of Carrara, superintending the excavation and ship ment of the necessary marbles. In the spring he returned to Rome, and when the marbles arrived fell to with all his energy at the preparations for the work. For a while the pope followed their progress eagerly. But presently his disposition changed. In Michelangelo's absence an artist who was no friend of his, Bramante of Urbino, had been selected by Julius to carry out a new architectural scheme, viz., the rebuilding of St. Peter's church. To the influence and the malice of Bramante, Michelangelo at tributed the' unwelcome invitation he now received to interrupt the great work of sculpture in order to decorate the Sixtine chapel with frescoes. Soon, however, schemes of war and conquest inter posed to divert the thoughts of Julius from artistic enterprises. To add to the artist's discomfiture, when he went to apply for payments due, he was first put off from day to day, and at last actually with scant courtesy dismissed. At this he took horse and left Rome, and before the messengers of the pope could over take him was safe on Florentine territory. Michelangelo's flight took place in April 1506. Once among his own people, he turned a deaf ear to all overtures made from Rome for his return, and stayed throughout the summer at Florence.
During the same sum mer Julius planned and executed the victorious military campaign which ended with his unopposed entry at the head of his army into Bologna. Thither, under strict safe-conduct and promises of renewed favour, Michelangelo was at last persuaded to betake him self. Julius received the truant artist kindly, as indeed between these two volcanic natures there existed a natural affinity, and ordered of him his own colossal likeness in bronze, to be set up over the principal entrance of the church of St. Petronius. For the next fifteen months Michelangelo devoted his whole strength to this new task. In the technical art of metal casting he was inex perienced, and the work was cast by a Milanese whom Michel angelo had called, and on Feb. 2 1, 1508, the majestic bronze col ossus of the seated pope, robed and mitred, with one hand grasp ing the keys and the other extended in a gesture of benediction and command, was raised to its station over the church porch. Three years later it was destroyed in a revolution. The people of Bologna rose against the authority of Julius; his delegates and partisans were cast out, and his effigy hurled from its place. The work of Michelangelo, after being trailed in derision through the streets, was broken up and its fragments cast into the furnace.
Meanwhile the artist had followed his recon ciled master back to Rome. The task that here awaited him, how ever, was the execution of the series of paintings in the Sixtine chapel. Painting, he always averred, was not his business ; he was aware of his enemy's hopes that a great enterprise in fresco painting would prove beyond his powers; and he entered with mis giving and reluctance upon his new undertaking. Destiny, how ever, so ruled that the work thus thrust upon him remains his chief title to glory. The only work which in all his life he was able to complete as he had conceived it was this of the decoration of the Sixtine ceiling. The pope had at first desired a scheme including figures of the twelve apostles only. Michelangelo proposed instead a design of many hundred figures embodying the story of Genesis from the Creation to the Flood, with accessory personages of prophets and sibyls dreaming on the new dispensation to come, and, in addition, those of the forefathers of Christ. The whole was to be enclosed and divided by an elaborate framework of painted architecture, with a multitude of nameless human shapes supporting its several members or reposing among them—shapes mediating, as it were, between the features of the inanimate frame work and those of the great dramatic and prophetic scenes them selves. The pope bade the artist do as he pleased. By May 1508
the preparations in tile chapel had been completed and the work begun. Later in the same year Michelangelo summoned a number of assistant painters from Florence. He soon dismissed them, and carried out the remainder of his colossal task alone, except for purely mechanical and subordinate help. The physical condi tions of prolonged work, face upwards, upon this vast expanse of ceiling were trying in the extreme.
After four and a half years of toil the task was accomplished. Michelangelo had been harassed alike by delays of payment and by hostile intrigue. Absolute need of funds for the furtherance of the undertaking constrained him at one moment to break off work and pursue his inconsiderate patron as far as Bologna. This was between September 151o, by which time the whole of the great series of subjects along the centre of the vault were com pleted, and January 1511, when the master set to work again and began filling the complicated lateral spaces of his decorative scheme.
The main field of the Sixtine ceiling—in form a depressed barrel vault—is divided in Michelangelo's scheme into four larger, alternating with five smaller fields. The following is the order of the subjects depicted in them : (I) the dividing of the light from the darkness; (2) the creation of sun, moon and stars; (3) the creation of the waters; (4) the creation of man; (5) the creation of woman; (6) the temptation and expulsion; (7) the sacrifice of Noah; (8) the deluge; (9) the drunkenness of Noah. The figures in the last three of these scenes are on a smaller scale than those in the first six. In numbers 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9, the field of the picture is reduced by the encroachments of the architec tural framework with its seated pairs of supporters, commonly known as "Slaves" or "Atlases." Flanking these smaller composi tions, along the lateral spaces between the crown of the vault and the walls on either side, are seated figures of prophets and sibyls alternately ; two other prophets are introduced at each extremity of the series—making seven prophets and five sibyls in all. In the triangles to right and left of the prophets at the two extremi ties are the death of Goliath, the death of Holofernes, the brazen serpent and the punishment of Haman. In the twelve lunettes above the windows are groups of the ancestors of Christ, their names designated by inscriptions, and in the twelve triangles above them (between the prophets and sibyls) other kindred groups crouched or sitting. These last are all shown in relatively simple human actions and household relations, heightened but not falsified by the artist's genius, and rising into majestic sig nificance from roots deep in daily human nature. The work represents all the powers of Michelangelo at their best. Disdain ing all the accessory allurements of the painter's art, he has concentrated himself upon the exclusive delineation of the human form and face at their highest power. His imagination has con ceived attitudes and combinations of unmatched variety and grandeur, and countenances of unmatched expressiveness and power. As for the intellectual meanings of his vast design, they are inexhaustible, and can never be perfectly defined. Whatever the soul of this great Florentine, the spiritual heir of Dante, with the Christianity of the middle ages not shaken in his mind, but expanded and transcendentalized, by the knowledge and love of Plato ,—whatever the soul of such a man, full of suppressed ten derness and righteous indignation, and of anxious questionings of coming fate could conceive—that Michelangelo has expressed or shadowed forth in this great scheme of paintings. The powers of the artist seeem to have expanded with the progress of his work. He seems to have begun (as the spectator entering the chapel has to begin) with what is chronologically the last subject of the series, and rising in ascending scale of majesty through the suc cessive acts of creation from the last to the first.