As with other artistic conceptions of the middle
age, its treatment became almost conventional, handed on from artist to
artist, with slight changes, till it came to have almost an independent,
abstract existence of its own. It was characteristic of the medieval
mind thus to give an independent traditional existence to a special
pictorial conception, or to a legend, like that of Tristram or
Tannhaeuser, or even to the very thoughts and substance of a book, like
the Imitation, so that no single workman could claim it as his own, and
the book, the image, the legend, had itself a legend, and its fortunes,
and a personal history; and it is a sign of the medievalism of
Michelangelo, that he thus receives from tradition his central
conception, and does but add the last touches, in transferring it to the
frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
But there was another tradition of those earlier more serious
Florentines, of which Michelangelo is the inheritor, to which he gives
the final expression, and which centres in the sacristy of San Lorenzo,
as the tradition of the Creation centres in the Sistine Chapel.
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