From the upper air a company of angels descends, carrying a cross, a crown of thorns, and other instruments of the Saviour’s sufferings.  Below them is the Judge himself surrounded by the apostles and other saints.  Underneath are the archangels blowing their trumpets.  On earth, in the lowest part of the picture at the left, the dead rise from their graves and ascend through the air to the Judge.  At the right, opposite the ascending dead, are the condemned sinners, descending to the boat which will carry them over the river Styx into the Inferno.

[Illustration:  CENTRAL FIGURES OF THE LAST JUDGMENT. Sistine Chapel, Rome.]

Our illustration gives only the central figures in this great multitude, the Divine Judge accompanied by his mother.  He is a man of mighty muscular power, young and handsome, with an expression of imperious dignity.  Enthroned on the clouds, he seems just rising from a sitting posture to execute his judgments.  He lifts his arms in a sweeping motion as if to part the multitudes pressing upon him on both sides.  In so doing he shows the wound in his right side made by the soldier’s spear at the crucifixion.  Neither expression nor gesture manifests anger; those beautiful hands with delicately extended fingers will strike no blow.  The gesture itself is a command.

Beneath Christ’s upraised arm, on his right side, sits his Mother Mary.  Each must interpret for himself her attitude and expression.  Some think that because she turns her face away she is shrinking from her son in terror.  Yet her expression is so gentle that others say she is nestling close to him for protection.  This is certainly as we should imagine the situation.  When she was a young mother, she was proud to take care of her child.  And now on this great day she is equally proud to let him take care of her.  As he clung to her, his mother, so she now clings to him, the Judge.

Looking at the composition of the picture, we see that her figure completes a pyramid, whose apex is the uplifted hand of the Judge, and whose base lies along the cloud supporting his feet and hers.  This gives proper stability to the figures which dominate the whole great picture.  Considered in a larger way, the pyramid is itself the upper part of a long oval which keeps the central group apart from the surrounding host.

The picture of the Last Judgment was painted by Michelangelo on the end wall of the Sistine Chapel, over the altar, nearly twenty years after the completion of the ceiling frescoes.  There is a great difference between the two works.  The figures on the ceiling are strong and powerful, their attitudes spirited and graceful.  Those in the Last Judgment are huge and cumbersome, their attitudes strained and violent.  The entire effect of the vast company of colossal figures is awe-inspiring, but not pleasing.