Vasari says that not very long before the Last Judgment was finished, Michelangelo fell from the scaffolding, and seriously hurt his leg.  The pain he suffered and his melancholy made him shut himself up at home, where he refused to be treated by a doctor.  There was a Florentine physician in Rome, however, of capricious humour, who admired the arts, and felt a real affection for Buonarroti.  This man contrived to creep into the house by some privy entrance, and roamed about it till he found the master.  He then insisted upon remaining there on watch and guard until he had effected a complete cure.  The name of this excellent friend, famous for his skill and science in those days, was Baccio Rontini.

After his recovery Michelangelo returned to work, and finished the Last Judgment in a few months.  It was exposed to the public on Christmas Day in 1541.

Time, negligence, and outrage, the dust of centuries, the burned papers of successive conclaves, the smoke of altar-candles, the hammers and the hangings of upholsterers, the brush of the breeches-maker and restorer, have so dealt with the Last Judgment that it is almost impossible to do it justice now.  What Michelangelo intended by his scheme of colour is entirely lost.  Not only did Daniele da Volterra, an execrable colourist, dab vividly tinted patches upon the modulated harmonies of flesh-tones painted by the master; but the whole surface has sunk into a bluish fog, deepening to something like lamp-black around the altar.  Nevertheless, in its composition the fresco may still be studied; and after due inspection, aided by photographic reproductions of each portion, we are not unable to understand the enthusiasm which so nobly and profoundly planned a work of art aroused among contemporaries.

It has sometimes been asserted that this enormous painting, the largest and most comprehensive in the world, is a tempest of contending forms, a hurly-burly of floating, falling, soaring, and descending figures.  Nothing can be more opposed to the truth.  Michelangelo was sixty-six years of age when he laid his brush down at the end of the gigantic task.  He had long outlived the spontaneity of youthful ardour.  His experience through half a century in the planning of monuments, the painting of the Sistine vault, the designing of facades and sacristies and libraries, had developed the architectonic sense which was always powerful in his conceptive faculty.  Consequently, we are not surprised to find that, intricate and confused as the scheme may appear to an unpractised eye, it is in reality a design of mathematical severity, divided into four bands or planes of grouping.  The wall, since it occupies one entire end of a long high building, is naturally less broad than lofty.  The pictorial divisions are therefore horizontal in the main, though so combined and varied as to produce the effect of multiplied curves, balancing and antiphonally inverting their lines of sinuosity.  The pendentive upon