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Updated: May 3, 2025
There is no real reason, with reference to life itself, why the Mona Lisa of Leonardo should smile inscrutably upon us before a background of jagged rocks and cloudy sky; and the curtains in Raphael's Sistine Madonna are introduced merely as a detail of composition, and are not intended as a literal statement that curtains hung upon a rod exist in heaven.
Very soon I heard a rich voice chanting a solemn strain from Palestrinas' Miserere; the very music I had listened to in the Sistine Chapel, a few months before; and peeping from my sheltered nook, I saw a man clad in monkish garb stoop to drink from the spring.
And, says another critic, "he is the inventor of epic painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine Chapel which exhibits the origin, progress, and final dispensation of the theocracy.
This prince, Guidobaldo della Rovere, when he afterwards succeeded to the Duchy of Urbino, sent a really warm-hearted despatch to his "dearest Messer Michelangelo." He begins by saying that, though he still cherishes the strongest wish to see the monument of his uncle completed, he does not like to interrupt the fresco in the Sistine Chapel, upon which his Holiness has set his heart.
These principles he put immediately to the test in his first decorative undertaking. For the vault of the Sistine he designed a mighty architectural framework in the form of a hypaethral temple, suspended in the air on jutting pilasters, with bold cornices, projecting brackets, and ribbed arches flung across the void of heaven.
And now the doors of the Sistine Chapel once more close upon the master, not to be opened again until the Christmas of 1541. Michael Angelo had to destroy three frescoes by Perugino and two lunettes of his own upon the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel for his new scheme. He is said to have had the wall rebuilt of well-baked bricks, so possibly the old frescoes had suffered from damp and dirt.
Some obscure and secret sorrow has for a moment overwhelmed the soul of the great poet in thinking of Florence, of the world, of the hearts of men, and as though trying to explain to himself his own melancholy and indignation, he has carved these statues, to which men have given the names of the most tremendous and the most sweet of natural things Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn; and even as in the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo has thought only of Life, of the Creation of Man, of the Judgment of the World, which is really the Resurrection, so here he has thought only of Death, of the death of the body, of the soul, and of the wistful life of the disembodied spirit that wanders disconsolate, who knows where? that sleeps uneasily, who knows how long?
He'd like to know what I thought. It seemed little enough to do to bring a bit of gladness into this old gentleman's life, and I was not the man to wound him by refusal. It was as if Michelangelo had said "Come on round to the Sistine Chapel this afternoon and look over a little thing I've dashed off." If he had brought two bottles instead of one my answer would have been the same.
Ah, how beautiful it is to be dreaming about a future, though it may never come true! to be floating on the sunset tide of Venice; to be journeying over the passes of the Alps in summer, and always approaching Mount Blanc; to be resting by the fountain in Alhambra's Court of Lions; to be gazing at the Sistine Madonna in Dresden, or at the Ascension in the Vatican; to be dosing in an orange grove in southern California; to be awed by the deep canons of the Colorado, or to be filled with the sublimity of the Yosemite!
It was the key of Paradise. I had waited for it so long that I said to myself almost superstitiously: "I wonder whether anything will prevent again?" The anniversary of the day I had left Copenhagen the year before, I drove to the Vatican, went at one o'clock mid-day up the handsome staircase, and through immense, in part magnificently decorated rooms to the Sistine Chapel.
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