By Martin Schoen: St. Michael, attired in a long loose robe and floating mantle, tramples on the demon; he has thrown down the shield, and with his lance in both hands, but without effort, and even with a calm angelic dignity, prepares to transfix his adversary. The figure is singularly elegant. The demon has not here the usual form of a dragon, but is a horrible nondescript reptile, with multitudinous flexile claws, like those of a crab, stretched out to seize and entangle the unwary;—for an emblematical figure, very significant (36). In an old fresco by Guariente di Padova[68] the angel is draped as in Martin Schoen’s figure, but the attitude is far less elegant. Sometimes the dragon has a small head at the end of his tail, instead of the forked sting. I recollect an instance of St. Michael transfixing the large head, while a smaller angel, also armed, transfixes the other head.[69] This is an attempt to render literally the description in the Apocalypse: ‘For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt.’ (Rev. ix. 19.) In a most elegant figure of St. Michael, from the choir of the San Giovanni, at Malta, I found the demon thus characterised, with a tail ending in the serpent head. In an old Siena picture[70] St. Michael is seated on a throne: in one hand a sword, in the other the orb of sovereignty; under his feet lies the dragon mangled and bleeding: a bad picture, but curious for the singular treatment. [Illustration: 36 St. Michael (Martin Schoen)] In the sixteenth century these figures of St. Michael become less ideal and angelic, and more and more chivalrous and picturesque. In a beautiful altar-piece by Andrea del Sarto, now in the Florence Academy, there is a fine martial figure of the Archangel, which, but for the wings, might be mistaken for a St. George; and in the predella underneath, on a small scale, he is conqueror of the demon. The peculiarity here is, that the demon, though vanquished, makes a vain struggle, and has seized hold of the belt of the angel, who, with uplifted sword, and an action of infinite grace and dignity, looks superior down, as one assured of victory. Raphael has given us three figures of St. Michael, all different, and one of them taking rank with his masterpieces. The first is an early production, painted when he was a youth of nineteen or twenty, and now in the Louvre. St. Michael, armed with a shield on which is a red cross, his sword raised to strike, stands with one foot on a monster; other horrible little monsters, like figures in a dream, are around him: in the background are seen the hypocrites and thieves as described by Dante; the first, in melancholy procession, weighed down with leaden cowls; the others, tormented by snakes: and, in the distance, the flaming dolorous city. St. Michael is here the vanquisher of the Vices. It is a curious and fantastic, rather than poetical, little picture.