Last Judgment In November 1545, Aretino wrote an open letter to Michelangelo criticizing the nudity in The Last Judgment. His dialogues, , Aretino wrote, "demonstrate the superiority of my reserve to your indiscretion, seeing that I, while handling themes lascivious and immodest, use language comely and decorous, speak in terms beyond reproach and inoffensive to chaste ears. You, on the contrary, presenting so awful a subject, exhibit saints and angels, these without earthly decency, and those without celestial honors[…]. Your art would be at home in some voluptuous bagnio, certainly not in the highest chapel in the world[…]. I do not write this out of any resentment for the things I begged of you. In truth, if you had sent me what you promised, you would only have been doing what you ought to have desired most eagerly to do in your own interest". John Addington Symonds writes, "Aretino’s real object was to wheedle some priceless sketch or drawing out of the great master. This appears from a second letter written by him on the 20th of January 1538." Symonds describes Michelangelo's answer to Aretino's November 1545 letter: "Under the form of elaborate compliment it conceals the scorn he must have conceived for Aretino and his insolent advice. Yet he knew how dangerous the man could be, and felt obliged to humour him." In Michelangelo's The Last Judgment, completed in 1541, he had painted Saint Bartholomew displaying his own flayed skin. "[T]he sagging flayed skin […] many scholars believe depicts Michelangelo's own features. Interestingly, the face of Saint Bartholomew [who is holding the skin] is similar to the face of Pietro Aretino, one of Michelangelo's chief persecutors." But these resemblances were unrelated to Aretino's letter to Michelangelo. Bernadine Barnes writes that "no sixteenth-century critic noticed [that the flayed skin represents Michelangelo]. Nor did any contemporary critic notice the portrait of Pietro Aretino in the fresco[...] [V]iewers of our own time have often seen him as St Bartholomew, who brandishes a knife in one hand and holds the skin with the semblance of Michelangelo's face in the other. However, Aretino's criticism [of Michelangelo] was not written until 1545, four years after the fresco was completed. Even Aretino's good friend Vasari did not recognize him." Legacy Aretino is frequently mentioned in English works of the Elizabethan and later periods and differently appreciated, in comments ranging from "It was one of the wittiest