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Updated: May 3, 2025
They soon joined the throngs that filled the vast temple of St. Peter's, to which all turn during this solemn season. After attending a service and viewing the treasures of the Cathedral, they turned their steps to the Sistine Chapel, which contains the wonderful painting of the Last Judgment by Michael Angelo. It was here that the celebrated Miserere by Allegri was performed.
Madonnas, saints, and such like pictures which fill the churches of Italy and Spain, works of the old masters, are now chiefly prized for their grace of form and richness of coloring, exhibitions of ideal beauty, charming as creations, but not such as we see in real life; George Eliot's novels, on the contrary, are not works of imagination, like the frescos in the Sistine Chapel, but copies of real life, like those of Wilkie and Teniers, which we value for their fidelity to Nature.
They were possibly right. There was nothing to study in Dresden, and no education to be gained, but the Sistine Madonna and the Correggios were famous; the theatre and opera were sometimes excellent, and the Elbe was prettier than the Spree. They could always fall back on the language.
It seems however, that the Sistine singers resented the appointment of a new member, and complained about it. Several changes in the Papal chair occurred at this time, and when Paul IV, as Pope, came into power, he began at once with reforms. Finding that Palestrina and two other singers were married men, he put all three out, though granting an annuity of six scudi a month for each.
Peter's, and during the remainder of his life was attended by prosperity and success. One of the important works which he did for Leo X. was the making of cartoons, or designs to be executed in tapestry for the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, where Michael Angelo had painted his great frescoes.
Peter, which he practically completed, is his most enduring monument; the mural decorations in the Sistine Chapel at Rome, telling on a grandiose scale the Biblical story from Creation to the Flood, are marvels of design; and his grand fresco of the Last Judgment is probably the most famous single painting in the world.
If the Sistine Madonna could step down off those clouds and hand the infant to the young woman on her left, he might marry HER; but even then he would be afraid he might see some one next day who did her hair more becomingly, or that her foot would not look so well on his Persian rugs as it does on that cloud. He won't marry money, because he has plenty of it.
The grave eyes of the man, eyes whose clearness and youth seemed to be such an age-old youth and clearness as one sees in the eyes of the sibyls in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel eyes empty of a thought of self, impersonal, serene with the serenity of a large atmosphere the unflinching eyes of the man gazed at the girl as she talked.
Their treatment, for example, of the creation of Adam and Eve, adopted in all probability from still earlier and ruder workmen, after being refined by the improvements of successive generations, may still be observed in the triumphs of the Sistine Chapel and the Loggie.
If this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge from the wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly in the sculpture galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze.
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