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Page 52
At last necks and eyes grew tired, and when Mr. Sumner saw this, he
asked all to sit for a time on one of the benches, in a corner apart
from others who were there.
"I know just how you feel," he said. "You are disappointed. The frescoes
are so far above our heads; their colors are dull; they are disfigured
by seams; there are so many subjects that you are confused and weary.
You are already striving to retain their interest and importance by
connecting them with the personality of their creator, and are
imagining Michael Angelo swung up there underneath the vault, above his
scaffoldings, laboring by day and by night during four years. You are
beginning in the wrong place to rightly comprehend the work.
"It is the magnitude of Michael Angelo's _conceptions_ that puts him
among the very first of painters; and it is the conception of these
frescoes that makes them the most notable paintings in the world. We
must dwell on this for a moment. When the work was begun it was the
artist's intention to paint on the end wall, opposite the altar, the
Fall of Lucifer, the enemy of man, who caused sin to befall him. This
was never accomplished. Then he designed to cover the ceiling (as he
did) with the chief Biblical scenes of the world's history that are
connected with man's creation and fall--to picture all these as looking
directly forward to Christ's coming and man's redemption; and then to
complete the series, as he afterward did, by painting this great _Last
Judgment_ over the altar. Is it not a stupendous conception?
"Let your eyes run along the ceiling as I talk. God is represented as a
most superbly majestic Being in the form of man. He separates light from
darkness. He creates the sun and moon. He commands the waters to bring
forth all kinds of fish; the earth and air to bring forth animal life.
He creates Adam: nothing more grand is there in the whole realm of art
than this magnificent figure, perfect in everything save the reception
of the breath of eternal life; his eyes are waiting for the Divine spark
that will leap into them when God's finger shall touch his own. He
creates Eve. In Paradise they sin, and are driven out by angels with
flaming swords. Then, a sad sequence to the parents' weakness, Cain
murders his brother Abel. The flood comes and destroys all their
descendants save Noah. He who has withstood evil is saved with his
family in the ark, and becomes the father of a new race."
"And do the pictures at the corners, and the single figures, have
anything to do with this subject?" asked Malcom, after a pause, during
which all were busy following the thoughts awakened by Mr. Sumner's
words.
[Illustration: MICHAEL ANGELO. SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME.
THE DELPHIAN SIBYL.]
"Yes, indeed; nothing here is foreign to the one great thought of the
painter. The four irregular spaces at the corners are filled with
representations of important deliverances of the Jewish people from
evil,--David slaying Goliath, the hanging of Haman, the serpent raised
in the wilderness, and Judith with the head of Holofernes. The
connection in Michael Angelo's mind evidently was that God, who had
always provided a help for His people, would also in His own time give
a Saviour from their sins.
"Ranged along the sides you see seven prophets and five sibyls: the
prophets foretold Christ's coming to the Jewish world, and the sibyls
sang of it to the Gentile world.
"Nowhere, however, do we see the waiting and the longing for the
coming of the Redeemer more strikingly shown than in these
families,--'Genealogy of the Virgin' they are commonly called,--that are
painted in the triangular spaces above the windows. Each represents a
father, mother, and little child, every bit of whose life seems utterly
absorbed with just the idea of patient, expectant waiting. When troubled
and weary, as we all are sometimes, you know, I have often come here to
gain calmness and strength by looking at one or two of these groups;"
and Mr. Sumner paused, with his eyes fixed on one of the loveliest of
the Holy Families, as they are sometimes called, as if he would now
drink in its spirit of hopeful peace.
"They are waiting," he resumed after a few minutes, "as only those can
wait who confidently hope; and, therefore, there is really nothing in
the rendering of all this grand conception that more clearly points to
the Saviour's coming than do these.
"I think this part of the frescoes has not generally received the
attention it merits.
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