Michael Angelo is the prophet or seer of the Renaissance. It would be impossible to imagine a stronger contrast than that which distinguishes his art from Correggio's, or lives more different in all their details, than those which he and Raphael or Lionardo lived respectively. During the eighty-nine years of his earthly pilgrimage he saw Italy enslaved and Florence extinguished; it was his exceeding bitter fate to watch the rapid decay of the arts and to witness the triumph of sacerdotal despotism over liberal thought. To none of these things was he indifferent; and the sorrow they wrought in his soul, found expression in his painting.[264] Michael Angelo was not framed by nature to fascinate like Lionardo or to charm like Raphael. His manners were severe and simple. When he spoke, his words were brief and pungent. When he wrote, whether in poetry or prose, he used the fewest phrases to express the most condensed meaning. When asked why he had not married, he replied that the wife he had--his art--cost him already too much trouble. He entertained few friends, and shunned society. Brooding over the sermons of Savonarola, the text of the Bible, the discourses of Plato, and the poems of Dante, he made his spirit strong in solitude by the companionship with everlasting thoughts. Therefore, when he was called to paint the Sistine Chapel, he uttered through painting the weightiest prophecy the world has ever seen expressed in plastic form. His theme is nothing less than the burden of the prophets and the Sibyls who preached the coming of a light upon the world, and the condemnation of the world which had rejected it, by an inexorable judge. Michelet says, not without truth, that the spirit of Savonarola lives again in these frescoes. The procession of the four-and-twenty elders, arraigned before the people of Brescia to accuse Italy of sin--the voice that cried to Florence, "Behold the sword of the Lord, and that swiftly! Behold I, even I, do bring a deluge on the earth!" are both seen and heard here very plainly. But there is more than Savonarola in this prophecy of Michael Angelo's. It contains the stern spirit of Dante, aflame with patriotism, passionate for justice. It embodies the philosophy of Plato. The creative God, who divides light from darkness, who draws Adam from the clay and calls forth new-born Eve in awful beauty, is the Demiurgus of the Greek. Again, it carries the indignation of Isaiah, the wild denunciations of Ezekiel, the monotonous refrain of Jeremiah--"Ah, Lord, Lord!" The classic Sibyls intone their mystic hymns; the Delphic on her tripod of inspiration, the Erythraean bending over her scrolls, the withered witch of Cumae, the parched prophetess of Libya--all seem to cry, "Repent, repent! for the kingdom of the spirit is at hand! Repent and awake, for the judgment of the world approaches!" And above these voices we hear a most tremendous wail: "The nations have come to the birth; but