The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1928-04-20


4 III, called NIichelangelo to Rome
and asked him to complete his work
in the Sistine Chapel by painting
over the altar a pictur Of the
Last Judgment" Once more Mich
elangelo protested that he was not a
painter. But the pope knew that
no man living could do better, or as
we'll; and so, after twenty-five years
Of intermission, Angelo assembled the
scafold again, in the spirit of a
criminal condemned.
He was SO now, and wanted only
to be left to die in peace; he could
not know that his bent and tor
tured body had still thirty years to
live, and that he must not only paint
the Sistine chapel but build St.
Peters dome. So he worked on and
on, for eight hard years. Once he
fell from the scaffolding, and was so
badly hurt that the pope feared he
would die; he lay alone at home in
his bed, refusing to be treated by a
physician; but the best doctor in
Rome secretly found entrance to
him, and refused to leave the house
till Angelo was well. He went back
to his task, and in 1912 the Last
Judgment" was complete.
1t is the largest and most famous
painting in the world, though its
immensely has unfairly won from
the epic on the ceiling the credit for
being the masters masterpiece. The
conception of such wholesale
damnation of men and women to
everlasting torment indicates how
far Michelangelo was from sharing
the humanitarian skepticismS of
leonardo; apparently the artist here
takes the barbarlc notion Of an ever
lasting hell with literal faith; as
with Savonarola and Luther, the
prophetic rigor in his character in
clined him to severe theology.
TITO our contemporary prejudice
l. the picture is unpleasant; we
can no longer imagine deity who
would be severer with human frail-
ties than the hardest earthly judge.
We try to put this prejudice aside,
and tell ourselves that this IS art
and not theology; but the prejudice
turks even in our esthetic judgment,
and we find faults that might not
be there if we were of a medieval
mind
The figure of Christ seems alb
surdly athletic; this is not the gen.
tie sage who forgave the woman
taken in adultery But in truth,
Angelo was not interested in this
aspect of the matter; what stirred
him here was the opportunity to
study the human body in a hun
dred poses and forms. each dis
tinctive and unique. All the figures
are made except that of the Virgin,
and a few to whose bodies some
flying garment partly clings; it is
tropical conception of Heaven.
Cardinal Bialgo, as the work pro-
coded, protested to the Pope against
this riot of anatomy as background
for the altar of Gods vicar; hear
ing which, Michelangelo painted the
Cardinals face Unmistakably
among the damned. Biagio ragged
and begged the Pope to compel the
artist to take him out of the pic
ture; but the Pope genially remind
ed him that by the unanimous agree
ment of the theologians not even
a Pope could take a soul out of hell.
All the world came to see this
immense fresco; and all Italian art
was colored by it into the baroque-
the bizarre, the exaggerated. and
the forced. Romanticism in italian
art begins here; the allgeheipheit
or universally, of the Greeks, is
gone, and individual emotion and
character appear in dramatic and
violent expression. We come away
as if from Dante's Inferno; we feel
that any man who could have
painted such a picture must him.
self have been through a hell Of
torment in his life.
This is not picture, 1t is a SER
mon, a terrible prophecy of the end
of the Renaissance in the destruc-
ton of Italy too sOftened with
pleasures to fight for its liberty;
this is Savonarola come back from
the grave; it is the dawn Of the
counter reformation.
Il =
NNE final task remained; and in
~ a field so different that one
wonders at the artists triumph in
! it.