On September 1, 1535, he appointed him by official letters architect-in-chief, sculptor and painter to the Apostolic Palace with a salary for life of twelve hundred golden crowns a year, of which six hundred were the revenue (uncertain and at once contested) of a toll-bridge on the Po near Placentia.[62] Ever since April, 1535, Michelangelo had agreed to work on the Last Judgment. The idea of completing the decoration of the Sistine Chapel with that fresco originated with Clement VII, who had already talked to Michelangelo about it in 1533. At that time the plan also included a Fall of Lucifer[63] on the entrance wall of the Sistine. The first thing to be done was to destroy the frescoes of Perugino which covered the great wall below the altar.[64] This did not, of course, trouble Michelangelo, who despised Perugino and called him a "blockhead." He worked on the Last Judgment from 1536 to 1541.[65] While he was working at it probably in 1539 he fell from the scaffold and injured himself seriously in the leg. Still he completed his immense task by December 25, 1541, the day when the public was admitted to see it. No one of his works has been more diversely judged. Before considering it at all, we should remember that it was the work of an old man between sixty and sixty-six. The vitality which this "terrible" man still possessed after a life of exhausting labours and troubles is, whatever we may think of the work, something superhuman. The first thing which strikes us in that colossal fresco twenty metres high and ten wide and swarming with hundreds of figures, is order, reason and imperious will, controlled and almost cold. The innumerable human bodies, a throng which produces at first a sense of stifling discomfort, are gathered in a dozen groups which balance each other and are all drawn along in a dizzying whirl from right to left around the Christ. If we turn to the drama itself we are overwhelmed by an impression of brutal force. Force alone rules. There is no soul; nothing but unreasoning physical force and the terror of it. The moment chosen is terrible. Through the thunder of the trumpets blown to bursting by the angels, the herculean Christ curses. "Now there is no longer any time for pity or room for pardon."[66]