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The decoration of the Sistine Chapel now consisted, firstly, on the flat of the vault, of Michael Angelo’s history of the Creation and the Fall of Man, of the Punishment of the Flood, and the Second Entry of Sin into the World; secondly, on the pendentives, of the Prophets and Sibyls proclaiming the coming of a Redeemer; and thirdly, of the Ancestors of Christ, filling the arches of the windows and the arches on the two end walls.
Thus only can we explain the ease with which the Assyrian builder surmounted difficulties some of which would have puzzled a modern architect, such as the pisé vaults erected over spacious galleries without any kind of centering, and the domes over square chambers, for which some system of pendentives that is, of arches or other intermediate forces by which the base of the cupola could be allied to the top of the supporting wall, must have been contrived.
Yet even in what seems this decadence of his talent Raphael only needed a new problem to revive his admirable powers in their full splendor. Among his latest works were the pendentives of the Farnesina, with the story of Cupid and Psyche works painted and even drawn by his pupils, coarse in types and heavy in color but altogether astonishing in freedom and variety of design.
It is a peculiarity of their construction that they rest, not on drums, but on pendentives of a curious character. A series of semi-circular arches is thrown across the angles of the apartment, each projecting further into it than the preceding, and in this way the corners are got rid of, and the square converted into the circular shape.
On the pendentives between the spaces of the windows, running up to the ends of each of the five lesser pictures, Michelangelo placed alternate prophets and sibyls upon firm projecting consoles. Five sibyls and five prophets run along the side-walls of the chapel. The end-walls sustain each of them a prophet.
The pendentives with their cherub heads are carried by corbels in the corners, and the dome is divided by bold ribs, themselves enriched with carving, into panels filled with strapwork.
Moreover, in the lunettes and the arches over the windows other figures of grace, power, and beauty appear and throng, the ancestors of the Christ, thoughtful mothers with lovely nude infants, men with wondering eyes peering into the future, representatives of the punished weary race longing for the promised Redeemer; while in the pendentives of the four corners various biblical episodes, the victories of Israel over the Spirit of Evil, spring into life.
The four triangular spaces between the corners of the square so enclosed and the circle or ring resting upon it are filled by what are termed "pendentives" features which may, perhaps, be best described as portions of a dome, each just sufficient to fit into one corner of the square, and the four uniting at their upper margin to form a ring. From this ring springs the main dome.
The vaulting of the side aisles, or rather that over the schola, was arched from pier to pier longitudinally and transversely, the quadrangular spaces being in all probability simply groined; but a fragment of box tiles found almost leads one to think that these spaces were vaulted by a domical vault, springing either from pendentives in the angles of the vaults, more common in later work, or from a slight cornice on a level with the apex of the arches.
It is the structure on which Moslem art has played the greatest number of variations, cutting off its angles, building it on a circular or polygonal plan, and endlessly modifying the pyramids and pendentives by which the ground-plan of one story passes into that of the next.
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