Page:Anecdotes of painters, engravers, sculptors and architects, and curiosities of art (IA anecdotesofpaint01spoo).pdf/77

 of his taste that no artist could please him; and as in sculpture, every pincer, file, and chisel which he used, was the work of his own hands, so in painting, he prepared his own colors, and did not commit the mixing and other necessary manipulations to mechanics and boys."

Lanzi says that Michael Angelo must be acknowledged supreme in that peculiar branch of the profession (the nude), at which he aimed in all his works, especially in his Last Judgment. "The subject appeared rather created han selected by him. To a genius so comprehensive, and so skilled in drawing the human figure, no subject could be better adapted than the Resurrection; and to an artist who delighted in the awful, no story more suitable than the day of supernal terrors. He saw Raffaelle preëminent in every other department of the art; he foresaw that in this alone could he expect to be triumphant; and perhaps he indulged the hope that posterity would adjudge the palm to him who excelled all others in the most arduous walk of art."

"The Last Judgment," says Lanzi, "was filled with such a profusion of nudity that it was in great danger of being destroyed, from a regard to the decency of the sanctuary. Paul IV. proposed to whitewash it, and was hardly appeased with the correction of its most glaring indelicacies, by some drapery introduced here and there by Daniello da Volterra, on whom the facetious Romans, from this circumstance, conferred the nickname of the