Michelangelo in later life finished that great chapel of Pope Julius
(the Sistine), he never rose halfway to the same pitch of power; his
genius never afterwards attained to the force of those first studies."
Allowing for some exaggeration due to enthusiasm for things enjoyed in
early youth, this is a very remarkable statement. Cellini knew the
frescoes of the Sistine well, yet he maintains that they were inferior
in power and beauty to the Battle of Pisa. It seems hardly credible;
but, if we believe it, the legend of Michelangelo's being unable to
execute his own designs for the vault of that chapel falls to the
ground.

VII

The great Cartoon has become less even than a memory, and so, perhaps,
we ought to leave it in the limbo of things inchoate and
unaccomplished. But this it was not, most emphatically. Decidedly it
had its day, lived and sowed seeds for good or evil through its period
of brief existence: so many painters of the grand style took their
note from it; it did so much to introduce the last phase of Italian
art, the phase of efflorescence, the phase deplored by critics steeped
in mediaeval feeling. To recapture something of its potency from the
description of contemporaries is therefore our plain duty, and for
this we must have recourse to Vasari's text. He says: "Michelangelo
filled his canvas with nude men, who, bathing at the time of summer
heat in Arno, were suddenly called to arms, the enemy assailing them.
The soldiers swarmed up from the river to resume their clothes; and
here you could behold depicted by the master's godlike hands one
hurrying to clasp his limbs in steel and give assistance to his
comrades, another buckling on the cuirass, and many seizing this or
that weapon, with cavalry in squadrons giving the attack. Among the
multitude of figures, there was an old man, who wore upon his head an
ivy wreath for shade. Seated on the ground, in act to draw his hose
up, he was hampered by the wetness of his legs; and while he heard the
clamour of the soldiers, the cries, the rumbling of the drums, he
pulled with all his might; all the muscles and sinews of his body were
seen in strain; and what was more, the contortion of his mouth showed
what agony of haste he suffered, and how his whole frame laboured to
the toe-tips. Then there were drummers and men with flying garments,
who ran stark naked toward the fray. Strange postures too: this fellow
upright, that man kneeling, or bent down, or on t