and the instruments of the Passion. Below at the right is a savage melee
of souls and angels in a hand-to-hand struggle. At the left the bodies
rise heavily from Purgatory like inflated balloons drawn up by the sun.
At the bottom is the monstrous harvest of the earth giving up its dead;
Hell, full of the atrocious horror of suffering and the still more
atrocious joy of creating suffering. "Charon with eyes like burning
coals, who smites with his oars." The maddened damned, crowded together
like a herd of sheep, demons grabbing shrieking souls who hide their
eyes and ears with horror, the falling of bodies which come down like
masses of lead, and in the extreme right-hand corner Minos, evil and
undisturbed.

There is in such a work a mass of wrath, vengeance and hate which is
suffocating. If it was not purified by colossal and almost elementary
force it would be insupportable.

[Illustration: SLAVE

Figure for the tomb of Julius II (1513-1516). Louvre.]

This, then, is what the Prophets and the Sibyls are looking forward to,
this is what the convulsive agony of the paintings of the ceiling
predicts. This implacable conclusion of human history conformed
perfectly to the essence of Christian thought, but the expression of
it was so audacious and so stripped of all compromise that it revolted
the majority of Christians, whom Michelangelo, aristocratic in his faith
as in his whole spirit, never considered at all.

It was not only Biagio da Cesena,[67] Master of Ceremonies to Paul III,
who declared the painting to be "improper"--"opera da stufe o d'osterie"
(work fit only for a bagnio or an inn), but the majority of Catholic
opinion agreed. Aretino sounded the alarm. He might not seem to be very
well qualified to do this, but he wanted to revenge himself on
Michelangelo, who had not shown that regard for him which the Master
Singer knew how to exact even from kings.[68] The author of "The
Hypocrite,"[69] the prototype of Tartuffe, was also the model.

"Messire," he wrote in November, 1545, "as a baptised man I am ashamed
of the license which you have permitted yourself in expressing your
conception of that end toward which turn all the aspirations of our true
faith. Now behold that this Michelangelo, a man of such astounding fame
and universally admired, has exposed to the world as much impiety and
irreligion as perfection of painting. Is it possible that you, who,
being divine, do not condescend to have commerce with