By degrees, however, this licence evoked murmurings, which grew stronger day by day, and as Michelangelo more than anyone else had ennobled the practice, by inscribing above the private altar of the popes the sublimest and most terrible page of philosophy ever written by painter’s brush, he was specially marked out for attack. Undoubtedly he was generally recognised as the responsible enunciator of this new principle of art, and it is a clear proof of the general and almost unopposed onslaught on him that the man most keenly alive to the drift of fashion, Aretino, ventured to indulge in virulent invective against him upon this subject. After the Council of Trent, a veritable crusade was organised with the noble end of purging the churches of too lifelike anatomies. It is the correct thing, in the _Joanne_,[175] to make merry at the expense of Pope Paul IV., dubbed by facetious and satirical people with the humiliating sobriquet of the “breeches maker,” because he caused some veracious but really unessential details in the work of Michelangelo to be timidly covered with gauze, and because he generously presented the Holy Virgin with the dress she badly wanted. At the risk of incurring the same reproaches and of becoming a by-word to guide-books past, present, and future, we shall here confess that it seems difficult to blame him. The _Last Judgment_, though absolutely pure in intention, became for the popes quite a stumbling-block from the moment they entered upon the highly legitimate crusade of artistic purification; when in 1573 Veronese was reproached for introducing into _Last Suppers_ details little tending to edification, he did not fail to plead the example of the Sistine chapel. There is not a doubt but that Calvin would have shown himself much more rigorous than Paul IV.