§ 66. THE ARTISTS. 605
marble group representing the Virgin Mary holding the crucified Saviour in her arms, raised him suddenly to the rank of the first sculptor of Italy. ^ His Last Judgment^ on the altar wall of the Sistine chapel, represents the dominant conception of the Middle Ages of Christ as an angry judge, and is as Dantesque as Dante's Inferno itself .2 The artist's last work in marble was the unfinished Pieta, in the cathedral of Florence; his last design a picture of the crucifixion. Jji his last poems, hejboolcjarejs£ll_pf_the fleeting pleasures of life, turned to God as the only reality and found in the crucified Saviour his only comfort. This is the core of the evangelical doctrine of justification rightly understood.
The day of Michelangelo's death was the day of Galile^) Galilei's birth in Florence. The golden age of art had passed : the age of science was at hand.
Among the greater churches of Italy, — the cathedrals of Milan, Venice, Pisa, Siena, Florence and Rome, — St. Peter's stands pre-eminent in dimensions, treasures of art and imposing ecclesiastical associations. ^ This central cathedral of Christendom was not detlicated till 1626 by Urban VIII. Its reconstruction was planned on a colossal scale by Nicolas V., but little was done till Julius II. took up the work. Among the architects who gave to the building their thought, Bramante and Michelangelo did most. On April 18, 1506, Julius II. laid the first stone according to Bramante's design. A mass being said by Cardinal Soderini, the old pope descended by a ladder into the trench which had been dug at the spot where the statue of St. Veronica now stands. There was much fear, says Paris de Grassis, that the ground would fall in and the pope, before consecrating the foundations, cried out to those above not to come too near the edge. Under Leo X., Raphael was appointeji sole architect, and was about to deviate from Bramante's plan, when death stayed his hand. Michelangelo, taking,up._tli^
1 See Grimm's description, I. 186 sqq.
2 Grimm, II. 224, speaks of the expression on Christ's face as indescribably repelling, but says, if a last judgment has to be painted with Christ as the judge, such an aspect must be given him.
3 Pastor, III. 54-9, following Redtenbacher, gives a list of the more important pieces of ecclesiastical architecture in Italy, 1401-1518.
606 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
task in 1535, gave to the structure its crowning triumph in
the dome, the noblest in Western Europe, and the rival of the
dome of St. Soj^hia.
That vast and wondrous dome, To which Diana's marvel was a cell, — Christ's niighly shrine above his martyr's tomb.i
§ 67. The Revival of Paganism.
The revival of letters and tligjcultivatxo" of ^^t limiig-bt do purification of moxalitojtaly nox relief from religious formalism. The great modern historians of the period, — Voigt, Burckhardt, Gregorovius, Pastor, Creighton and Symonds, — agree in depicting the decline of religion and the degeneracy of morals in dark colors, although Pastor endeavors to rescue the Church from the charge of total neglect of its duty and to clear the mediaeval hierarchy and theology from the charge of being responsible for the semi-paganism of the Renaissance.
The meditevaljtheologxb^^ J?yt ^'^^ priesthood in the place of the individual conscience. Far from possessing any passion to rescue Italy from a religious formalism which involved the seeds of stagnation of thought and moral disintegration, the priesthood was corrupt at heart and corrupt in practice in the highest seats of Christendom. ^ Poinding the clerical mind of Italy insincere and the moral condition of the Church corrupt, H umanism not only made no serious effort to amend this deplorable state but, on the contrary, it contributed to the further decadence of morals by a revival of paganism, now Epicurean, now Stoical, attested both in the lives and the writings of many of its chief leaders. Gregorovius has felt justified in pronouncing the terrible sentence that the sole end of the Italian Renaissance was pa^^amsm.^
The worship of classical forms led to the adoption of classical ideas. There were not wanting Humanists and artists who combined culture with Christian faith, and devoted their
1 With these lines of Ryron may be coupled those of Schiller : —
Und ein ziceitcr Himniel in den Ilimmel Steigt Sand Petcr''s wnndcrsamer Dom.
2 See Burckhardt-Geiger, II. 178 sqq. « VII. 636.