The Last Judgment done, its mighty significance probably lost on all who beheld it beyond the mere talking about it, Paul III. hustled the artist to the painting of the side-walls of the Cappella Paolina. Close on seventy when he started upon it, and seventy-four when on the two [227] frescoes of The Conversion of St. Paul and The Martyrdom of St. Peter he used the brush for the last time, he owned at last that his powerful frame was surrendering its prodigious energy and strength-he confessed to Vasari that he did his last fresco "with great effort and fatigue." It may be that something of the fire had gone out of his body's force, as out of the wondrous significance of his mastery in art ; but even whilst he painted these frescoes, he finished at last, forty years after he first designed its splendid intention, the modified design of the great tomb of Pope Julius II., in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, that had been the tragedy of his artistic life. It was a sad belittling of his great design, but it gave us the great Moses, and the two astoundingly fine female figures of Active and Contemplative Life.

His solemn pledge to the dead Pope fulfilled, Michelangelo fell into a heavier gloom ; a profound Melancholy took him for her own. Wearied by the fierce plaguings of his career and destiny, wracked with religious gloom, yearning for peace and rest, but unable to thrust aside his innate energy, his famed sonnet proves that his art no longer satisfied him : " Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest my soul, that turns to His great love on high." He was not to be allowed rest. The great church of St. Peter's, to the magnificent rebuilding of which the Pope Julius II. had set Bramante-to hold, with fitting splendour, Michelangelo's vast monument to him-had, at the death of Bramante, passed under the design of Raphael, at whose death it had passed to Antonio da Sangallo, who died in the October of 1546, the year after Michelangelo finished Julius II.'s reduced tomb. Michelangelo, still at work on the frescoes of the Cappella Paolina, was, in spite of his refusal, and his plea that architecture was not his art, so bullied and pestered into the business by Paul III., that he [228] consented to become the architect of the great church of Catholic Christendom on condition of receiving no payment for it, since he was henceforth only desirous to practise his art as a devotional act.

It was shortly after his appointment as architect of St. Peter's that, in 1547, the romantic and beautiful friendship of Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna was brought to an end by her death, which left Michelangelo " dazed as one bereft of sense.'

Cancelling the alterations that had been made to Bramante's original design, Michelangelo designed, on absolute symmetry, Bramante's original Greek cross, so that the vast dominant note from within and without should be a great cupola. Destroying Sangallo's work, he put down all jobbery with a stern hand-increasing thereby the swarm of his enemies, who thenceforth intrigued night and day against him. But Paul III., who died in 1549, and Julius III. who reigned in his stead, knew full well that Michelangelo's art meant immortality for them. The vast pile rapidly arose under the mighty will of Michelangelo ; all intrigues were brushed aside ; and by 1557 the rugged old artist of eighty-two saw the huge cupola itself come to its beginnings. But at eighty-two, even the body of a Michelangelo knows the vigour of youth no longer. Unable now to direct the actual building, he set up the wooden model which may still be seen at the Vatican ; and whilst his assistants worked from it, the rugged old man, from the windows of his house, watched by the hour together the mighty cupola begin to swell to roundness against the blue of the heavens.

But the twilight of his life was to bring gloom and bitter sorrow to Michelangelo. His two brothers died in Florence, and his nephew Lorenzo, son of his beloved [229] brother Buonarroto, alone remained to him of all his near kin. Then the loss of his faithful servant, Francesco Urbino, filled him with grief. But his restless and energetic will drove his hand to prodigious creation still-he planned the improvements on the Capitol-designed the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini - designed the monument to Giangiacomo de' Medici that Leone Leoni raised in Milan Cathedral-planned the changing of the Baths of Diocletian into the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli-poured out sketches of palaces, statues, and the like for others to carry out. However, he knew joy in his nephew and that nephew's marriage. He was at least wealthy, and his habits were frugal. Sleeping little, and working at night upon his sculpturings, wearing a cap with a candle stuck in the front of it whereby to give him light, he lived his lonely life, dreaming art. Princes courted his society, the Count of Canossa was proud to claim him kin. The twilight of his old age was serene ; he knew the affection that he had poured upon his kin. Yet his will was irked by the smallness of his endeavour-he poured forth in his famed sonnet his lament at the loss of his once vigorous creative force. The restless power of the man fought his ninety years. On the edge of ninety the old giant took his walks abroad careless of all weather. To his old friend Tiberio Calcagni's protest, meeting him on the 14th of February 1564 in the street, rain-drenched, he replies fiercely, " Let me be. I am ill, and can nowhere find rest." The next four days saw him crouched by the fire in an arm-chair, "oppressed with continual drowsiness." At last the old Adam rebels within him. He must shake off this sluggardy. He will go for a ride-he calls for his horse and tries to mount-he fails. He has not the strength. Without a word, he goes back again to the arm-chair, where, [230] in the afternoon of the 18th day of the February of 1564, a little before five of the clock, the giant of the Italian Renaissance yielded up his mighty spirit, as though he slept, into eternity. Peace came to his troubled life only at its ending.

But the poor body was to be vexed with strife even dead. His nephew, Leonardo Buonarroti, reaching Rome some three days after Michelangelo's death, found Rome, which had made the dead man a citizen, passionately set upon his burial there. Michelangelo's dying wish, to be buried in his own city of Florence, they flatly refused, and would not allow his body to be moved. It is said that Michelangelo dead was smuggled out of Rome in a bale of merchandise, and so brought to Florence, to be buried amidst great pomp and solemnity in the church of Santa Croce. But the sublime group of the Pietà, wrought by Michelangelo's hand with intent for his own tomb, was never set thereon.

It was through the sublime genius of Michelangelo that the late Renaissance in Central Italy, which had found its chief home in Florence, discovered its supreme and mighty utterance. Michelangelo was the complete voice of the Florentine achievement. With Michelangelo and Raphael, the early fifteen-hundreds were to see art depart from Florence into Rome, and take up her habitation amongst the ruins ; and, at the passing of Michelangelo, the ruins engulfed her, blotting her out.

Born in the same year as Fra Bartolommeo, he died on the edge of ninety, in 1564, forty-four years after Raphael had been laid in his grave, eighteen years after Raphael's chief disciple, Giulio Romano, died. When death took this giant of the Renaissance, the fifteen-hundreds had [231]passed into their second half-century. The Renaissance in Central Italy was dead.

Michelangelo ever claimed the bays as a sculptor alone. Though poet, architect, and painter of astounding achievement, and reaching to vast significance in all things that he essayed, he signed his letters, even whilst he wrought the mighty masterpiece of his ceiling-paintings in the Sistine Chapel, as though in very arrogance of the knowledge of that in which lay his supreme power and his immortal fame, as Michelangelo, sculptor.

He stands forth, rugged, uncompromising, stern, honest, virile, as the mighty Seer of the Renaissance, like some ancient Hebrew prophet, reckless of all authority, bent on rousing mankind to the vast dignities with which the Creator has endowed them, scorning his fellows for concerning themselves with petty toys and vulgar brawls, when the heights lay before them for the conquering. He felt the grandeur of life, its sublime powers, its vast experience ; and he uttered these majestic significances, gifted with an astounding craftsmanship that created a vast and awe-compelling art attune to the prodigious emotions that stirred within him, and which he wrought with a resonant and mighty music that compels homage.

Over all he wrought is a tragic gloom that utters itself in his sonnets as in his vasty art, whatsoever the craft he employed to utter that art-for his stern eyes saw the failure of Italy to reach to the splendid realm of Liberty that had stirred her to life. His eighty-nine years of storm-tossed living saw Italy a land of slaves, tied and bound under the heels of contemptible tyrannies ; he saw his beloved Florence blotted out ; he saw the arts decay ; and he died in the bitter knowledge that sacerdotal despotism had slain liberal thought in the Church which was so dear [232] to him, and which had created the knowledge it now feared.

Italy had been first amongst the nations in the new Awakening ; and his dying eyes beheld that she was become the last-lying prostrate, her eager life gone out of her, at the gates of the New Life that she had unlocked to the world. He looked upon his people, seeing that the light shone before them, but they could not understand.