Nevertheless, in its composition the fresco may still be studied; and after due inspection, aided by photographic reproductions of each portion, we are not unable to understand the enthusiasm which so nobly and profoundly planned a work of art aroused among contemporaries.
It has sometimes been asserted that this enormous painting, the largest and most comprehensive in the world, is a tempest of contending forms, a hurly-burly of floating, falling, soaring, and descending figures.

Nothing can be more opposed to the truth.
Michelangelo was sixty-six years of age when he laid his brush down at the end of the gigantic task.

He had long outlived the spontaneity of youthful ardour.

His experience through half a century in the planning of monuments, the painting of the Sistine vault, the designing of facades and sacristies and libraries, had developed the architectonic sense which was always powerful in his conceptive faculty.
Consequently, we are not surprised to find that, intricate and confused as the scheme may appear to an unpractised eye, it is in reality a design of mathematical severity, divided into four bands or planes of grouping.

The wall, since it occupies one entire end of a long high building, is naturally less broad than lofty.