Entering the Cappella Sistina, and raising our eyes to sweep the roof, we have above us a long and somewhat narrow oblong space, vaulted with round arches, and covered from end to end, from side to side, with a network of human forms. The whole is coloured like the dusky, tawny, blueish clouds of thunderstorms. There is no luxury of decorative art;--no gold, no paint-box of vermilion or emerald green, has been lavished here. Sombre and aërial, like shapes condensed from vapour, or dreams begotten by Ixion upon mists of eve or dawn, the phantoms evoked by the sculptor throng that space. Nine compositions, carrying down the sacred history from the creation of light to the beginning of sin in Noah's household, fill the central compartments of the roof. Beneath these, seated on the spandrils, are alternate prophets and sibyls, twelve in all, attesting to the future deliverance and judgment of the world by Christ. The intermediate spaces between these larger masses, on the roof and in the lunettes of the windows, swarm with figures, some naked and some draped--women and children, boys and young men, grouped in tranquil attitudes, or adapting themselves with freedom to their station on the curves and angles of the architecture. In these subordinate creations Michael Angelo deigned to drop the terrible style, in order that he might show how sweet and full of charm his art could be. The grace of colouring, realised in some of those youthful and athletic forms, is such as no copy can represent. Every posture of beauty and of strength, simple or strained, that it is possible for men to assume, has been depicted here. Yet the whole is governed by a strict sense of sobriety. The restlessness of Correggio, the violent attitudinising of Tintoretto, belong alike to another and less noble spirit. To speak adequately of these form-poems would be quite impossible. Buonarroti seems to have intended to prove by them that the human body has a language, inexhaustible in symbolism--every limb, every feature, and every attitude being a word full of significance to those who comprehend, just as music is a language whereof each note and chord and phrase has correspondence with the spiritual world. It may be presumptuous after this fashion to interpret the design of him who called into existence the heroic population of the Sistine. Yet Michael Angelo has written lines which in some measure justify the reading. This is how he closes one of his finest sonnets to Vittoria Colonna: Nor hath God deigned to show Himself elsewhere More clearly than in human forms sublime; Which, since they image Him, compel my love.