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As one day in the presence of his master Michael Angelo pulled down the scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, and the workmen cleared away the ropes and plaster and litter, and looking up men saw the faces of angels and seraphs, with their lustrous and immortal beauty, so some glad day will that angel named Death pull down life's scaffolding and set forever in the sunlight that structure built of thoughts, the stately mansion reared in the mind, the building not made with hands, the character, eternal in the heavens.
And oh the monotonous miles of rain-washed asphalte! <i>December 30th</i>. I have had nothing to do with the "ceremonies." In fact I believe there have hardly been any no midnight mass at the Sistine chapel, no silver trumpets at St. Peter's. Everything is remorselessly clipped and curtailed the Vatican in deepest mourning.
But to the mind of the latter, such a scheme had been long present; it dawned on his fancy in Rome, even as he lay on his back marveling in the Sistine, and he saw in imagination a long and shadowy succession of pictures. He figured to himself a magnificent temple, and filled it, as the illustrious artists of Italy did the Sistine, with pictures from his favorite poet.
Gazing at Michelangelo's prophets in the Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally religious. But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on a level with that of the sculpture of Phidias.
The last of these works is one of the loveliest of Michael Angelo's productions, whether we regard the symmetry of its composition or the refinement of its types. The two groups of two boys standing behind the central group on either hand of the Virgin, have incomparable beauty of form. The supreme style of the Sistine is here revealed to us in embryo.
Thus the painting of the Last Judgment, with which, as the sum of his art, that giant spirit filled the Sistine Chapel, seems to remind us more of the first ages of the Earth and its products, than of its last.
The unfathomable secret of the tomb is in the spiritual expression of the guarding genius, and the elaborately complex movement concentrated upon the urn and directly inspired by the ephebes of the Sistine ceiling is a mere blind. The same is true of the portrait heads which within his range M. Saint Marceaux does better than almost anyone.
The old reckoning of the time consumed by Michelangelo in painting the roof of the Sistine, and the traditions concerning his mode of work there, are clearly fabulous. Condivi says: "He finished the whole in twenty months, without having any assistance whatsoever, not even of a man to grind his colours."
Why, then, does the world, precisely now, seem so fair to me, now, when I know that I must leave it so soon?" And the pope shed a secret tear while, surrounded by royal splendor, he imparted his blessing to the thousands who reverently knelt at his feet. The bells rang, the organ resounded, the wide halls of St. Peter's were penetrated by the marvellous singing of the Sistine chapel.
Josquin was a singer in the Sistine Chapel in 1484 and his first successes as a composer were obtained in Rome. Later he went to Ferrara where he wrote for the Duke Ercole d'Este his famous mass, "Hercules Dux Ferrariæ." But these activities of Josquin had little relation to the frottola.
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