weightiest prophecy the world has ever seen expressed in plastic form.  His theme is nothing less than the burden of the prophets and the Sibyls who preached the coming of a light upon the world, and the condemnation of the world which had rejected it, by an inexorable judge.  Michelet says, not without truth, that the spirit of Savonarola lives again in these frescoes.  The procession of the four-and-twenty elders, arraigned before the people of Brescia to accuse Italy of sin—­the voice that cried to Florence, “Behold the sword of the Lord, and that swiftly!  Behold I, even I, do bring a deluge on the earth!” are both seen and heard here very plainly.  But there is more than Savonarola in this prophecy of Michael Angelo’s.  It contains the stern spirit of Dante, aflame with patriotism, passionate for justice.  It embodies the philosophy of Plato.  The creative God, who divides light from darkness, who draws Adam from the clay and calls forth new-born Eve in awful beauty, is the Demiurgus of the Greek.  Again, it carries the indignation of Isaiah, the wild denunciations of Ezekiel, the monotonous refrain of Jeremiah—­“Ah, Lord, Lord!” The classic Sibyls intone their mystic hymns; the Delphic on her tripod of inspiration, the Erythraean bending over her scrolls, the withered witch of Cumae, the parched prophetess of Libya—­all seem to cry, “Repent, repent! for the kingdom of the spirit is at hand!  Repent and awake, for the judgment of the world approaches!” And above these voices we hear a most tremendous wail:  “The nations have come to the birth; but there is not strength to bring forth.”  That is the utterance of the Renaissance, as it had appeared in Italy.  She who was first among the nations was now last; bound and bleeding, she lay prostrate at the temple-gate she had unlocked.  To Michael Angelo was given for his portion—­not the alluring mysteries of the new age, not the joy of the renascent world, not the petulant and pulsing rapture of youth:  these had been divided between Lionardo, Raphael, and Correggio—­but the bitter burden of the sense that the awakening to life is in itself a pain, that the revelation of the liberated soul is itself judgment, that a light is shining, and that the world will not comprehend it.  Pregnant as are the paintings of Michael Angelo with religious import, they are no longer Catholic in the sense in which the frescoes of the Lorenzetti and Orcagna and Giotto are Catholic.  He went beyond the ecclesiastical standing ground and reached one where philosophy includes the Christian faith.  Thus the true spirit of the Renaissance was embodied in his work of art.

Among the multitudes of figures covering the wall above the altar in the Sistine Chapel there is one that might well stand for a symbol of the Renaissance.  It is a woman of gigantic stature in the act of toiling upwards from the tomb.  Grave clothes impede the motion of her body:  they shroud her eyes and gather round her chest.  Part only of her face and throat is visible, where may be read a look of blank bewilderment and stupefaction, a struggle with death’s slumber in obedience to some inner impulse.  Yet she is rising slowly, half awake, and scarcely conscious, to await a doom still undetermined.  Thus Michael Angelo interpreted the meaning of his age.