There is something ignoble in the task of recording rivalries and jealousies between artists and men of letters. Genius, however, like all things that are merely ours and mortal, shuffles along the path of life, half flying on the wings of inspiration, half hobbling on the feet of interest the crutches of commissions. Michelangelo, although he made the David and the Sistine, had also to make money. He was entangled with shrewd men of business, and crafty spendthrifts, ambitious intriguers, folk who used undoubted talents, each in its kind excellent and pure, for baser purposes of gain or getting on. The art-life of Rome seethed with such blood-poison; and it would be sentimental to neglect what entered so deeply and so painfully into the daily experience of our hero. Raffaello, kneaded of softer and more facile clay than Michelangelo, throve in this environment, and was somehow able--so it seems--to turn its venom to sweet uses. I like to think of the two peers, moving like stars on widely separated orbits, with radically diverse temperaments, proclivities, and habits, through the turbid atmosphere enveloping but not obscuring their lucidity. Each, in his own way, as it seems to me, contrived to keep himself unspotted by the world; and if they did not understand one another and make friends, this was due to the different conceptions they were framed to take of life the one being the exact antipodes to the other.
Postponing descriptive or aesthetic criticism of the Sistine frescoes, I shall proceed with the narration of their gradual completion. We have few documents to guide us through the period of time which elapsed between the first uncovering of Michelangelo's work on the roof of the Sistine (November 1, 1509) and its ultimate accomplishment (October 1512). His domestic correspondence is abundant, and will be used in its proper place; but nothing transpires from those pages of affection, anger, and financial negotiation to throw light upon the working of the master's mind while he was busied in creating the sibyls and prophets, the episodes and idyls, which carried his great Bible of the Fate of Man downwards through the vaulting to a point at which the Last Judgment had to be presented as a crowning climax. For, the anxious student of his mind and life-work, nothing is more desolating than the impassive silence he maintains about his doings as an artist. He might have told us all we want to know, and never shall know here about them. But while he revealed his personal temperament and his passions with singular frankness, he locked up the secret of his art, and said nothing.