Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/416

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386 Painting sorrowful dismay. Universally allowed to be a marvellous effort of human skill, the Last Judgment is inferior in beauty, if not in power, to the paintings of the vault. In it the great master has broken completely loose from all the traditions of Christian art, and his chief aim appears to have been to prove his knowledge of muscular develop- ment at every stage of human life, and his power of expressing all the most terrible of human emotions. Powerless rage, terror, doubt, and the struggle between fear and hope, are alike admirably rendered in this awful scene. Several engravings of the Last Judgment are in the British Museum. Michelangelo's only other paintings of importance were two frescoes in the Pauline Chapel, Rome, of the Cruci- fixion of 8. Peter and the Conversion of 8. Paul. They are now nearly destroyed ; but the British Museum con- tains some old engravings after them. The National Gallery has an unfinished picture of the Entombment of Christ, said to be by Michelangelo, though various critics will not admit its authenticity. The National Gallery also contains his design of a Dream of Human Life and that of the Raising of Lazarus, both supposed to have been executed by Sebastian del Piombo, his best pupil. In the latter there are some figures probably from the great master's own hand. His most important easel picture is the Holy Family of the year 1504, in the Uffizi, Florence (Fig. 136). Of Michelangelo's pupils the best were Marcello Venusti, Sebastiano Luciani, called del Piombo — three of whose pictures are in the National Gallery — and Daniele Ric- ciarelli, called da Volterra, who worked out something of an independent style of his own. His finest work, the