Altogether there are over 300 figures, with nearly all the males and angels originally shown as nudes; many were later partly covered up by painted draperies, of which some remain after recent cleaning and restoration.

[5] Sydney J. Freedberg interprets their "complex responses" as "those of giant powers here made powerless, bound by racking spiritual anxiety", as their role of intercessors with the deity had come to an end, and perhaps they regret some of the verdicts.

It appears that the moment has passed for her to exercise her traditional role of pleading on behalf of the dead; with John the Baptist this Deesis is a regular motif in earlier compositions.

Satan, the traditional Christian devil, is not shown but another classical figure, Minos, supervises the admission of the Damned into Hell; this was his role in Dante's Inferno.

[17] However, a number of late medieval panel paintings, mostly altarpieces, were based on the subject with similar compositions, although adapted to a horizontal picture space.

These include the Beaune Altarpiece by Rogier van der Weyden and ones by artists such as Fra Angelico, Hans Memling and Hieronymus Bosch.

Typically there is a strong contrast between the ordered ranks of figures in the top part, and chaotic and frenzied activity below, especially on the right side that leads to Hell.

[19] The damned may be shown naked, as a mark of their humiliation as devils carry them off, and sometimes the newly resurrected too, but angels and those in Heaven are fully dressed, their clothing a main clue to the identity of groups and individuals.

[21] Other scholars believe there was indeed a substitution of the more sombre final subject, reflecting the emerging mood of the Counter-Reformation, and an increase in the area of the wall to be covered.

There was an altarpiece of the Assumption of Mary by Pietro Perugino above the altar, for which a drawing survives in the Albertina,[28] flanked by tapestries to designs by Raphael; these, of course, could just be used elsewhere.

[36] As shown by drawings, the initial conception for the Last Judgment was to leave the existing altarpiece and work round it, stopping the composition below the frescos of Moses and Christ.

Once it was decided to remove this, it appears that a tapestry of the Coronation of the Virgin, a subject often linked to the Assumption, was commissioned, which was hung above the altar for important liturgical occasions in the 18th century, and perhaps from the 1540s until then.

Michelangelo was accused of being insensitive to proper decorum, in respect of nudity and other aspects of the work, and of pursuing artistic effect over following the scriptural description of the event.

[41] Michelangelo immediately worked Cesena's face from memory into the scene as Minos,[41] judge of the underworld (far bottom-right corner of the painting) with donkey ears (i.e. indicating foolishness), while his nudity is covered by a coiled snake.

[42] Pope Paul III himself was attacked by some for commissioning and protecting the work, and came under pressure to alter if not entirely remove the Last Judgment, which continued under his successors.

[46] The copy by Marcello Venusti added the dove of the Holy Spirit above Christ, perhaps in response to Gilio's complaint that Michelangelo should have shown all the Trinity.

The council's decree (drafted at the last minute and generally very short and inexplicit) reads in part: Every superstition shall be removed, ... all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust, ... there be nothing seen that is disorderly, or that is unbecomingly or confusedly arranged, nothing that is profane, nothing indecorous, seeing that holiness becometh the house of God.

In 1573, when Paolo Veronese was summoned before the Venetian Inquisition to justify his inclusion of "buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs, and other such absurdities" in what was then called a painting of the Last Supper (later renamed as The Feast in the House of Levi), he tried to implicate Michelangelo in a comparable breach of decorum, but was promptly rebuffed by the inquisitors,[49] as the transcript records:

Do you not know that in Germany and other countries infested by heresy, it is habitual, by means of pictures full of absurdities, to vilify and turn to ridicule the things of the Holy Catholic Church, in order to teach false doctrine to ignorant people who have no common sense?

...[50] Some action to meet the criticism and enact the decision of the council had become inevitable, and the genitalia in the fresco were painted over with drapery by the Mannerist painter Daniele da Volterra, probably mostly after Michelangelo died in 1564.

Daniele was "a sincere and fervent admirer of Michelangelo" who kept his changes to a minimum, and had to be ordered to go back and add more,[51] and for his trouble got the nickname "Il Braghettone", meaning "the breeches maker".

[53] Further campaigns of overpainting, often "less discreet or respectful", followed in later reigns, and "the threat of total destruction ... re-surfaced in the pontificates of Pius V, Gregory XIII, and probably again of Clement VIII".

[56] At a relatively early date, probably in the 16th century, a strip of about 18 inches was lost across the whole width of the bottom of the fresco, as the altar and its backing was modified.

[65] In many respects, modern art historians discuss the same aspects of the work as 16th-century writers: the general grouping of the figures and rendering of space and movement, the distinctive depiction of anatomy, the nudity and use of colour, and sometimes the theological implications of the fresco.

However, Bernadine Barnes points out that no 16th-century critic echoes in the slightest the view of Anthony Blunt that: "This fresco is the work of a man shaken out of his secure position, no longer at ease with the world, and unable to face it directly.

Writing of "energy" in the nude figure, Kenneth Clark has:[70] The twist into depth, the struggle to escape from the here and now of the picture plane, which had always distinguished Michelangelo from the Greeks, became the dominating rhythm of his later works.

It is the most overpowering accumulation in all art of bodies in violent movement"Of the figure of Christ, Clark says: "Michelangelo has not tried to resist that strange compulsion which made him thicken a torso until it is almost square.

Freedberg commented that "The vast repertory of anatomies that Michelangelo conceived for the Last Judgment seems often to have been determined more by the requirements of art than by compelling needs of meaning, ... meant not just to entertain but to overpower us with their effects.

"[72] He notes that the two frescos in the Cappella Paolina, Michelangelo's last paintings begun in November 1542 almost immediately after the Last Judgment, show from the start a major change in style, away from grace and aesthetic effect to an exclusive concern with illustrating the narrative, with no regard for beauty.

[73] Early appreciations of the fresco had focused on the colours, especially in small details, but over the centuries the build-up of dirt on the surface had largely hidden these.