attitudes, or the style and cast of their limbs or features,
that reminds us of their belonging to our own species.

Here I get plainly enough at what Sir
Joshua considers to be the crowning
excellence of high art. It is one great proof of
the poetry and sublimity of Michael Angelo's
pictures that the people represented in them
never remind us of our own species: which
seems equivalent to saying that the representation
of a man made in the image of Michael
Angelo is a grander sight than the representation
of a man made in the image of God.
I am a little staggered by these principles of
criticism; but as all the learned authorities
that I can get at seem to have adopted them,
I do my best to follow the example of my
teachers, and set off reverently for Rome to
see the two works of art which my critical
masters tell me are the sublimest pictures
that the world has yet beheld.

I go first to the Sistine Chapel; and, on a
great blue-coloured wall at one end of it, I see
painted a confusion of naked, knotty-bodied
figures, sprawling up or tumbling down below
a single figure, posted aloft in the middle,
and apparently threatening the rest with his
hand. If I ask Lanzi, or Vasari, or Sir
Joshua Reynolds, or the gentleman who has
compiled Murray's Hand-Book for Central
Italy, or any other competent authorities,
what this grotesquely startling piece of painter's
work can possibly be, I am answered that it
is actually intended to represent the
unimaginably awful spectacle of the Last
Judgment! And I am further informed that,
estimated by the critical tests applied to it
by these said competent authorities, the
picture is pronounced to be a master-piece of
grandeur and sublimity. I can see neither
the one nor the other in it—but then the
criterion of grandeur and sublimity in Art,
adopted by the competent authorities, is
altogether beyond my comprehension. As a last
resource, I resolve to look a little closer at
this celebrated work, and to try if I can get
at any fair estimate of it by employing such
plain, straightforward, uncritical tests, as will
do for me and for everybody.

Here is a fresco, which aspires to represent
the most impressive of all Christian subjects;
it is painted on the wall of a Christian church,
by a man belonging to a Christian community
—what evidences of religious feeling has it
to show me? I look at the lower part of the
composition first, and see—a combination of
the orthodox nursery notion of the devil with
the Heathen idea of the conveyance to the
infernal regions, in the shape of a horned and
tailed ferryman giving condemned souls a cast
across a river!

Let me try and discover next what
evidences of extraordinary intellectual ability
the picture presents. I look up towards the
top now, by way of a change, and I find
Michael Angelo's conception of the entrance
of a martyr into the kingdom of Heaven,
displayed before me in the shape of a flayed man,
presenting his own skin, as a sort of credential,
to the hideous figure with the threatening
hand—which I will not, even in writing,
identify with the name of Our Saviour.
Elsewhere, I see nothing but unnatural distortion
and hopeless confusion; fighting figures, tearing
figures, tumbling figures, kicking figures;
and, to crown all, a caricatured portrait, with
a pair of ass's ears, of a certain Messer Biagio
of Sienna, who had the sense and courage,
when the Last Judgment was first shown on
completion, to protest against every figure in
it being painted stark-naked!

I see such things as these, and many more
equally preposterous, which it is not worth
while to mention. All other people with
eyes in their heads see them, too. They are
actual matters of fact, not debateable matters
of taste. But I am not—on that account—
justified, nor is any other uncritical person
justified, in saying a word against the
picture. It may palpably outrage all the
religious proprieties of the subject; but, then, it
is full of "fine foreshortening," and therefore
we uncritical people must hold our tongues.
It may violate just as plainly all the intellectual
proprieties, counting from the flayed man
with his skin in his hand, at the top, to
Messer Biagio of Sienna with his ass's ears, at
the bottom; but, then, it exhibits "masterly
anatomical detail," and therefore we uncritical
spectators must hold our tongues. It may
strike us forcibly that, if people are to be
painted at all, as in this picture, rising out of
their graves in their own bodies as they
lived, it is surely important (to say nothing of
giving them the benefit of the shrouds in
which they were buried) to represent them as
having the usual general proportions of
human beings. But Sir Joshua Reynolds
interposes critically, and tells us the figures on
the wall and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
are sublime, because they don't remind us of
our own species. Why should they not
remind us of our own species? Because they
are prophets, sibyls, and such like, cries the
chorus of critics indignantly. And what then?
If I had been on intimate terms with Jeremiah,
or if I had been the ancient king
to whom the sibyl brought the mysterious
books, would not my friend in the one case,
and the messenger in the other, have
appeared before me bearing the ordinary
proportions and exhibiting the usual appearance
of my own species? Does not Sacred
History inform me that the prophet was a
Man, and does not Profane History describe
the sibyl as an Old Woman? Is old age
never venerable and striking in real life?—
But I am uttering heresies. I am
mutinously summoning reason and common
sense to help me in estimating an Old
Master. This will never do: I had better
follow the example of all the travellers I
see about me, by turning away in despair,
and leaving the Last Judgment to the critics
and connoisseurs.