Nor hath God deigned to show Himself elsewhere More clearly than in human forms sublime, Which, since they image Him, alone I love.[1] [1] J. A. Symonds, "The Sonnets of Michelangelo and Campanella," n. lvi. p. 90. It is certain that he studied anatomy far more deeply than any of his contemporaries, not excluding Leonardo da Vinci, and devoted so much time to dissecting that "it turned his stomach so that he could neither eat nor drink with benefit. Nevertheless," adds Condivi, "he did not give up until he was so learned and rich in such knowledge that he intended to write a treatise on the movements of the human body, its aspect, and concerning the bones, with an ingenious theory of his own, devised after long practice." Michelangelo has been accused by some critics, not wholly without reason, of having somewhat ostentatiously availed himself of his anatomical knowledge. In some figures of his _Last Judgment_, for instance, the muscular masses, the bones and tendons and other anatomical details are hardly concealed by the skin, as if he had painted from the _subject_ on the dissecting-table rather than from the living model. The result is undoubtedly striking and terrible, and we may even hazard the conjecture that the master purposely exaggerated his efforts in a picture representing the final resuscitation of the flesh, the awesome reconstruction and starting back into life of bodies long since reduced to dust. This "stupendous defect," if such it may be called, is far more apparent in Michelangelo's frescoes than in his works of sculpture. Having taken the human frame as the highest possible standard of beauty, Michelangelo made use of it in all his works not only as the principal theme, but as a decorative element. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, with its magnificent nude Athletes and allegorical figures, is the apotheosis of the human frame as the noblest means of decoration. By introducing nude figures in his tondo of the _Holy Family_ and by his powerful but utterly unconventional treatment of the angels and saints in the _Last Judgment_, Michelangelo once more affirmed his faith in the beauty and purity of the "human form divine" as a decorative element of religious art. He went even further, for in a letter to Cardinal Ridolfo da Carpi, which he wrote when engaged on the construction of St. Peter's, Michelangelo hazards the strange theory that the study of the human figure is indispensable not only to sculptors and painters, but to architects as well: "For it is very certain that the members of architecture depend upon the members of man. Who is not a good master of the figure, and especially of anatomy, cannot understand it."