The picture of the Last Judgment, that stupendous off spring of Michael Angelo's genius, was not painted till thirty years after he had terminated the ceiling and other works of the chapel. All his paintings partake much of his early habits of the chisel ; they are bold, grand, and nervous, as different from the softer works of the Venetian school, as sculpture is from painting. The magic of light and colours has no share of Michael Angelo's creations ; he painted man and mind, disregarding every thing second ary to his ruling purpose of representing the energy of which our nature is susceptible; and that under the most difficult attitudes and positions, giving magnitude in the smallest space, by the illusion of foreshortening, over which he possessed a miraculous power. We discover in his pictures the rare quality of interminable originality, conceptions never seen before, though often copied since.
When we look upon that colossal scene of the last Judg• ment, that huge wall of fifty feet high, by forty feet wide, entirely covered with naked figures, there is something sc, unlike what we have ever seen before, so adventurous, that it hurries all our preconceived ideas into utter chaos ; we hesitate whether to yield to the repugnonce of im probability, or to amazement at the fertility of such crea tive genius. Yet it is scarcely possible ever to become quite reconciled to so great profusion of nakedness, or to disembarrass our admiration from this counteracting in fluence; we can submit to much nakedness in sculpture, and even scarcely experience any alloy to our admiration. from what in painting could not fail to rouse the alarm of modesty. We are disposed to wave that fastidiousness, if it is but a single naked figure ; we feel as it were alone, and unexposed to observation ; but a community of the bare must ever require long habit and familiarity to blunt the edge of the natural repugnance to immodesty. Much, however, depends on the mode of representation ; a little reflection soon satisfies the spectator, that in such a subject as the last judgment any thing else would have been quite incongruous. Yet Zucheri had the absurdity to paint a clothed judgment, and Siguorelli conceived that he had most shrewdly overcome the dilemma, by half clothing the figures in his Last Judgment. In short, it is scarcely a subject befitting the pencil ; any representation, however grandiose, can but lower our idea, dark and uncertain as it must be, of that appalling event.
This picture occupied Michael Angelo eight years iu painting. In it every possible difficulty of the art, in de sign and foreshortening, scents to be exhibited, and suc cessfully ; even with a miraculous ease and playfulness of pencil, enough to spread despair among the succeeding generation of artists. There are three hundred figures,
and many of them shove the size of natnre.
Pictures of an ordinary size, from Michael pencil, are very rare. He despised that sort of small talk; while his mind was occupied with the splendid dramas of his greater productions, and much of what passes for his are the works of his imitators, as Daniel de Volterra, or Fra Sebastien. He made up for it, however, in the pro fusion of designs, which have been cherished ever since as treasures, and never fail to partake of the vigorous touch of the roaster. Vasari says that he never painted but one picture in oil, and resolved never to paint another after he had finished this one. The character of Michael Angelo was, grandeur of conception, profound knowledge of ana tomy and foreshortening, a daring pencil, which moved on the very verge of the supernatural, marking every muscle in the extreme of action, and somewhat at the ex pense of that truth and delicacy with which nature indi cates all the varieties of movement and expression.
He neglected, perhaps despised, the lesser elegancies and embellishments of art. One vast and lofty idea had ta ken complete possession of his mind, to the exclusion of every subordinate grace. Like Dante, lie was an epic painter of the most masculine and daring cast.
It is surprising in how short a space from the resuscita tion, the art reached that acme of perfection exhibited by the works of the great masters who were contemporaries of Michael Angelo ; a point which it has never been able to surpass, if even to equal. The result of an happy combi nation of events may again give it a spring forward, as it is certainly not an attainment to which we can conceive final limits of perfection, beyond which human efforts must fail. It w as the absence of affectation and subservi ency to the fashion, tastes, and manners of the day, which enabled the earl Cr masters to soar so far above their suc cessors, occupied with the study of nature in her simpler forms, and assisted by the chaste remains of Grecian taste. No sooner do painters begin to study and copy each other alone, and truckle to the taste of the times, satisfied if they succeed in pleasing the ignorant, from whose purses their labours arc to be rewarded, than the art begins in fallibly to retrograde, in spite of the efforts of those who may, from time to time, assume a juster view of their pro fession.