And to this feeling for the materially significant and all this power of conveying it, to all this more narrowly artistic capacity, Michelangelo joined an ideal of beauty and force, a vision of a glorious but possible humanity, which, again, has never had its like in modern times.  Manliness, robustness, effectiveness, the fulfilment of our dream of a great soul inhabiting a beautiful body, we shall encounter nowhere else so frequently as among the figures in the Sixtine Chapel.  Michelangelo completed what Masaccio had begun, the creation of the type of man best fitted to subdue and control the earth, and, who knows! perhaps more than the earth.

[Page heading:  LAST WORKS OF MICHELANGELO]

But unfortunately, though born and nurtured in a world where his feeling for the nude and his ideal of humanity could be appreciated, he passed most of his life in the midst of tragic disasters, and while yet in the fulness of his vigour, in the midst of his most creative years, he found himself alone, perhaps the greatest, but alas! also the last of the giants born so plentifully during the fifteenth century.  He lived on in a world he could not but despise, in a world which really could no more employ him than it could understand him.  He was not allowed, therefore, to busy himself where he felt most drawn by his genius, and, much against his own strongest impulses, he was obliged to expend his energy upon such subjects as the “Last Judgment.”  His later works all show signs of the altered conditions, first in an overflow into the figures he was creating of the scorn and bitterness he was feeling, then in the lack of harmony between his genius and what he was compelled to execute.  His passion was the nude, his ideal power.  But what outlet for such a passion, what expression for such an ideal could there be in subjects like the “Last Judgment,” or the “Crucifixion of Peter”—­subjects which the Christian world imperatively demanded should incarnate the fear of the humble and the self-sacrifice of the patient?  Now humility and patience were feelings as unknown to Michelangelo as to Dante before him, or, for that matter, to any other of the world’s creative geniuses at any time.  Even had he felt them, he had no means of expressing them, for his nudes could convey a sense of power, not of weakness; of terror, not of dread; of despair, but not of submission.  And terror the giant nudes of the “Last Judgment” do feel, but it is not terror of the Judge, who, being in no wise different from the others, in spite of his omnipotent gesture, seems to be announcing rather than willing what the bystanders, his fellows, could not unwill.  As the representation of the moment before the universe disappears in chaos—­Gods huddling together for the Goetterdaemmerung—­the “Last Judgment” is as grandly conceived as possible:  but when the crash comes, none will survive it, no, not even God.  Michelangelo therefore failed in his conception of the subject, and could