I have tried to put myself in the position of a visitor to the Sistine Chapel following the instincts of his eye. At this point, having glanced over the ceiling, his mind might well come in and ask the meaning of a whole of which he is becoming dimly aware. The nine scenes above are simply the historic axioms upon which the Christian scheme of redemption is based. The abstract sparseness of the nine episodes from Genesis is justified by the fact that they are less human events than terms in a great argument, which runs as follows: We were created innocent, sinned in our first parents, were spared in the world-flood and promised eventual redemption. This prolonged drama of redemption is witnessed by a solemn chorus of draped male and female figures enthroned impressively in the spandrels. Here, representing respectively the pagan and Hebrew world, are seven sibyls and five prophets who had the dim but certain vision of a coming Redeemer. These figures as Hawthorne has well said are “necessarily so gigantic because the weight of thought within them is so massive.” They brood quietly or sway with the burden of yearning. They are magnificently draped and contrast most decoratively with the many nudes of the ceiling. They vary in age and disposition. Contrast the actively inspired and youthful Daniel, or the fiery Ezechiel with the ponderous gravity of Jeremiah, Figure 201. What shades of delicate characterization are in the athletic loveliness of the Delphic Sibyl, Figure 202, the powerfully concentrated senility of The Cumean Sibyl, she who predicted to Virgil the new era of salvation, and the aristocratic aloofness of the Libyan seeress, Figure 203, most daintily preparing her day’s work in divination. [Illustration: FIG. 202. Michelangelo. The Delphic Sibyl. ] [Illustration: FIG. 203. Michelangelo. The Libyan Sibyl. ] Magnificent is the indignant sprawling form of the unwilling prophet Jonah, remanded by the sea to an ungrateful mission. He is the active counterpart of the passive Adam on the ceiling. He obeys under protest. The form itself, foreshortened against the curve of the spandrel, is a masterpiece of draughtsmanship. Decoratively it is the link between the nudes of the ceiling and the draped prophets and sibyls. Below the prophetic figures, in the older frescoes of the side walls, are set the foreshadowing of the work of salvation in the life of Moses and its accomplishment in the life of Christ, and the drama closes with Michelangelo’s Last Judgment on the altar wall. There Christ separates eternally the saved from the damned, echoing the definitive gesture with which God in the adjoining ceiling separates light from darkness. So the scheme closes with the inexorable logic with which it began.