In the large Rubens-room at Munich, there are two pictures of Michael subduing the revolted angels. The large one, in which Michael is the principal figure, is not agreeable. Rubens could not lift himself sufficiently above the earth to conceive and embody the spiritual, and heroic, and beautiful in one divine form; his St. Michael is vulgar. The smaller composition, where the fallen, or rather falling, angels fill the whole space, is a most wonderful effort of artistic invention. At the summit of the picture stands St. Michael, the shield in one hand, in the other the forked lightnings of divine wrath; and from above the rebel host tumble headlong ‘in hideous ruin and combustion hurled,’ and with such affright and amazement in every face, such a downward movement in every limb, that we recoil in dizzy horror while we look upon it. It is curious that Rubens should have introduced female reprobate spirits: if he intended his picture as an allegory, merely the conquest of the spiritual over the sensual, he is excusable; but if he meant to figure the vision in the Apocalypse, it is a deviation from the proper scriptural treatment, which is inexcusable. This picture remains, however, as a whole, a perfect miracle of art: the fault is, that we feel inclined to applaud as we do at some astonishing _tour de force_; such at least was my own feeling, and this is not the feeling appropriate to the subject. Though this famous picture is entitled the Fall of the Angels, I have some doubts as to whether this was the intention of the painter; whether he did not mean to express the fall of sinners, flung by the Angel of judgment into the abyss of wrath and perdition? [Illustration: 39 St. Michael as Angel of Judgment and Lord of Souls (Justus of Ghent)] In those devotional pictures which exhibit St. Michael as Lord of souls, he is winged and unarmed, and holds the balance. In each scale sits a little naked figure, representing a human soul; one of these is usually represented with hands joined as in thankfulness—he is the _beato_, the elected; the other is in an attitude of horror—he is the rejected, the reprobate; and often, but not necessarily, the idea is completed by the introduction of a demon, who is grasping at the descending scale, either with his talons, or with the long two-pronged hook, such as is given to Pluto in the antique sculpture. Sometimes St. Michael is thus represented singly; sometimes very beautifully in Madonna pictures, as in a picture by Leonardo da Vinci (A.D. 1498), where St. Michael, a graceful angelic figure, with light flowing hair, kneels before the Madonna, and presents the balance to the Infant, who seems to welcome the pious little soul who sits in the uppermost scale. [Illustration: 40 St. Michael (Signorelli, 1500. In the San Gregorio, Rome)]