One is filled with sorrow at the idea of their being drowned.

They are all, too, engaged in noble works; charity, energy, and inventiveness are amongst the virtues they exhibit; there is no panic, or struggling one with another; no anger or selfishness, excepting only in the boat in the middle distance; a woman helps her children, a man his wife, an old man bears a young man in his arms, Priam carrying AEneas, an even more pathetic imagination than Homer's; others attempt to save their household goods; others erect a tent; others, again, attempt to scale the sides of the ark or break into it with axes--one cannot but hope they will succeed.

The female figures are especially beautiful in this picture, and again we have a foretaste of that wonderful modelling of the flank and thigh seen to perfection in the tombs at San Lorenzo.

The weird sea and sky, the ark and the dead tree, show what Michael Angelo could do when he liked, in departments of art other than the human figure.

The individual figures in the Deluge are difficult to see on account of the smallness of scale in this part of the vault.