Further to last week’s blog, a quarter of a century later Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel to execute the Last Judgment for Pope Paul 111. In the intervening period Rome had been sacked and the papacy humiliated. Gone was Michelangelo’s faith in man’s power and yet, even with his painful awareness of the realities that restrain and ultimately blind men, Michelangelo again, as the subject of the Last Judgment unfolded to him, surpassed himself.
