the age of sixty, and, with a body announcing
weakness, make more chips of marble fly about in a quarter of an hour
than would three of the strongest young sculptors in an hour,--a thing
almost incredible to him who has not beheld it. He went to work with
such impetuosity and fury of manner, that I feared almost every moment
to see the block split into pieces. It would seem as if, inflamed by the
idea of greatness which inspired him, this great man attacked with a
Vigenere."

In painting Michael Angelo regarded colouring as of secondary
importance. He is not known to have executed one painting in oil, and he
treated oil and easel-painting generally as work only fit for women or
idle men. While he approached the sublime in his painting, it was by no
means faultless. Even in form his efforts were apt to tend to heaviness
and exaggeration, and the fascination which robust muscular delineation
had for him, betrayed him into materialism. Fuseli's criticism of
Michael Angelo's work, that Michael Angelo's women were female men, and
his children diminutive giants, is judged correct. Incomparably the
greatest painting of Michael Angelo's is his ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel. It includes upwards of 200 figures, the greater part colossal,
as they were to be looked at, in the distance, from below.

'The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel contains the most perfect
works done by Michael Angelo in his long and active life. Here
his great spirit appears in noblest dignity, in its highest
purity; here the attention is not disturbed by that arbitrary
display to which his great power not unfrequently seduced him in
other works. The ceiling forms a flattened arch in its section;
the central portion, which is a plain surface, contains a series
of large and small pictures, representing the most important
events recorded in the book of Genesis--the Creation and Fall of
Man, with its immediate consequences. In the large triangular
compartments at the springing of the vault are sitting figures
of the Prophets and Sibyls, as the foretellers of the coming
Saviour. In the soffits of the recesses between these
compartments, and in the arches underneath, immediately above
the windows, are the ancestors of the Virgin, the series leading
the mind directly to the Saviour. The external of these numerous
representations is formed by an architectural frame-work of
peculiar composition,