not help noticing how the
human body, its beauty, its power, and its grace were exalted! Ah! that
regal Jehovah, at once terrible and paternal, carried off amid the
whirlwind of his creation, his arms outstretched and giving birth to
worlds! And that superb and nobly outlined Adam, with extended hand, whom
Jehovah, though he touch him not, animates with his finger--a wondrous
and admirable gesture, leaving a sacred space between the finger of the
Creator and that of the created--a tiny space, in which, nevertheless,
abides all the infinite of the invisible and the mysterious. And then
that powerful yet adorable Eve, that Eve with the sturdy flanks fit for
the bearing of humanity, that Eve with the proud, tender grace of a woman
bent on being loved even to perdition, that Eve embodying the whole of
woman with her fecundity, her seductiveness, her empire! Moreover, even
the decorative figures of the pilasters at the corners of the frescoes
celebrate the triumph of the flesh: there are the twenty young men
radiant in their nakedness, with incomparable splendour of torso and of
limb, and such intensity of life that a craze for motion seems to carry
them off, bend them, throw them over in superb attitudes. And between the
windows are the giants, the prophets and the sibyls--man and woman
deified, with inordinate wealth of muscle and grandeur of intellectual
expression. There is Jeremiah with his elbow resting on his knee and his
chin on his hand, plunged as he is in reflection--in the very depths of
his visions and his dreams; there is the Sibylla Erithraea, so pure of
profile, so young despite the opulence of her form, and with one finger
resting on the open book of destiny; there is Isaiah with the thick lips
of truth, virile and haughty, his head half turned and his hand raised
with a gesture of command; there is the Sibylla Cumaea, terrifying with
her science and her old age, her wrinkled countenance, her vulture's
nose, her square protruding chin; there is Jonah cast forth by the whale,
and wondrously foreshortened, his torso twisted, his arms bent, his head
thrown back, and his mouth agape and shouting: and there are the others,
all of the same full-blown, majestic family, reigning with the
sovereignty of eternal health and intelligence, and typifying the dream
of a broader, loftier, and indestructible humanity. Moreover, in the
lunettes and the arches over the windows other figures of grace, power,
and beauty appear an