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.
Eventually we must endeavour to grasp Michelangelo's work in the Sistine as a whole, although it was carried out at distant epochs of his life.

For this reason I have thrown these sentences forward, in order to embrace a wide span of his artistic energy (from May 10, 1508, to perhaps December 1541).