As we read through the third chapter of "The Last Judgment and The Critics" from Bernadine Barnes's Michelangelo's Last Judgment - The Renaissance Response, it is striking to see the two completely opposite views on the fresco by the sixteenth century critics, where " those who approved of it saw it as the height of Renaissance art; those who disapproved saw it as an unsuitable use of art" and that "it was censured as the work of an arrogant man, and it was justified as a work that made celestial figures more beautiful than natural" (71).

The Last Judgment dealt with an especially evocative subject, and Michelangelo engaged viewers by creating highly imaginative scenes tempering fear with hope and by referring to contemporary events. The painting's original, elite audience--the papal court and a handful of distinguished lay persons--was sophisticated about art and poetry, almost exclusively male, and orthodox in its...