Another pope came, and wanted Michelangelo for his chief glorifier. The artist pleaded his old contracts, but the pope was furious, and commanded him to tear them up. He was put to work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and the result was the marvelous painting, “The Last Judgment,” in which all the terrors and torments of the Middle Ages are summed up. It was one of the world’s greatest paintings; but the pious of the time were shocked, and the pope put some of his other painters to putting panties on the nude saints. From time to time other shocked ecclesiastics had this or that article of clothing painted into the picture; and because they used any color they happened to have lying about, we can now form little idea of Michelangelo’s vision of the Day of Doom. All this time the artist was being hounded by the heirs of his first pope; but the present pope insisted that he should be the architect of St. Peter’s; so here we see the old man, over seventy, still fighting the grafters and hounded by conspirators. It appears that in Renaissance Rome, when a grafter was caught, and threatened to expose his fellow-grafters, he was shot, and the world was told that he had committed suicide; exactly as it happens in Washington, D. C., in these our days of oil-thieves and bootleggers! Michelangelo was still afraid, as he had been all his life; but he was still more afraid of God, and determined to finish St. Peter’s as a means of saving his soul at the Last Judgment. So he stuck and fought the grafters. There came yet another pope--the artist had to win each one in turn, thwarting a whole new set of intriguing enemies. We find him at the age of eighty-eight, exposing thieves who are building the walls of St. Peter’s out of rotten materials--and around him the thieves are stabbing each other. At last, at the age of ninety, he lies on his death-bed, his terrific labors at an end; and between his dying gasps he confides to a friend his one regret, that he has to die just when he has succeeded in learning the alphabet of his art! CHAPTER XXXII WHO IS CRAZY? When civilization emerged from the Dark Ages, the fighting man went about with a hard-shell covering, like a crab, and was called a knight. Both he and his horse underwent a long training, and when it was finished he was a fighting engine which could roll over anything else existing in the world. He went on crusades, and drove back the Saracen and the Turk from Europe. In these days of real and cruel danger he produced a genuine Art of Power: for example, “The Song of Roland,” an eleventh century French poem, telling of a terrific all-day battle against invading infidel hordes.