This story of creation was once the favorite subject of artists. In
the period before the invention of printing, people depended for their
instruction upon pictures about as much as we now do upon books.
Painters sometimes covered the walls and ceiling of churches with
illustrations of the book of Genesis, transforming them into huge
picture-books, from which the worshippers could learn the Bible
stories which they were unable to read in books.

Michelangelo was one of the last Italian painters to do this, and he
profited by all the work that had been done before to make the
grandest series of Genesis illustrations ever produced. It is from
this series that our illustration is taken, representing the subject
of the Creation of Man. The painter did not try to follow the text
very literally. In the book of Genesis we read:[19]--

[Footnote 19: Genesis, chapter i verses 26-27; chapter ii verse 7.]

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and
let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every
creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he
him.... And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
soul."

Michelangelo takes these words, and expresses, in his own way, the
supreme creative moment when "man became a living soul."