Thirty years earlier Michelangelo had depicted the Creation on the vault of this same chapel; he now took for his subject the final doom of all things created. The colossal work which cost him eight years' labour is a magnificent but almost terrifying pictorial rendering of the _Dies Irae_, the Day of Wrath, when "even the just shall not feel secure." Awe and terror are equally apparent among the spirits of the blessed crowding round the dread Judge, and on the despairing countenances of the condemned souls dragged down by hideous demons towards the infernal river, where Charon in his boat "beckons to them with eyes of fire and beats the delaying souls with uplifted oar." The rendering of the subject is thoroughly Dantesque, and very different from the conventional treatment of the same theme by all preceding artists. The composition, however, and indeed several individual groups and figures, remind us forcibly of the Campo Santo at Pisa. Although all true artists received this work with enthusiasm, as Vasari says, and came from every part of Italy to study it, Michelangelo's enemies, including Pietro Aretino, the most immoral writer of his age, criticised it as a highly improper painting, because most of the figures were nude. So incensed was Michelangelo at this that he revenged himself by painting one of his critics, Messer Biagio da Cesena, as Minos surrounded by a crowd of devils. Some years later Paul IV. obtained Michelangelo's consent to partly drape most of the figures, and the work was done with commendable discretion by Daniele da Volterra, who thereby earned the nickname of Il Braghettone, or the breeches-maker. Unfortunately the smoke from the altar candles and censers, and the dust of centuries have darkened and almost completely destroyed the original colour of this fresco; ominous cracks have also appeared in several places, but it is to be hoped that time will spare one of the greatest masterpieces of modern art for many centuries to come. No sooner had Michelangelo finished the _Last Judgment_, than Paul III. set him to work on the side walls of the chapel which Antonio da San Gallo had just completed, and which is now known as the Cappella Paolina. Michelangelo was nearly seventy years old at this time, and fresco painting over a large surface is a fatiguing task even for a young man, but the veteran artist obeyed, and in 1549 he completed what was to be his last pictorial work, the two frescoes representing the _Conversion of St. Paul_ and the _Martyrdom of St. Peter_.