As cartoons they began and ended ; they were destined never to be painted upon the walls. Leonardo da Vinci began painting a group of horsemen on the wall, but [215] abandoned its further painting for other schemes. Michelangelo was called to Rome in the early part of 1505 by Pope Julius II., and eagerly departed. Benvenuto Cellini copied Michelangelo's cartoon just in time ; for, almost immediately afterwards, a jealous and wretched painter, one Baccio Bandinelli, destroyed it.

The Albertina Gallery holds a sketch of it amongst its famous treasures ; and a fine copy of it, in monochrome painting, is at Holkham Hall, the seat of the Earl of Leicester.

The day that Michelangelo left Florence on his eager second journey to Rome, at the call of the Pope, he bade farewell for ever to such peace of mind and happiness as had been his.

Michelangelo went back to Rome to meet, in Pope Julius II., a man in many ways his own equal-in astounding energy, boundless ambition, each proud in his own strength, passionate in temper, brooking no opposition, prone to sudden outbursts of fury when thwarted, generous, forthright, and of great essence.

Raphael has left us his famous portrait of the grey-bearded old Pope, seated in his chair. The portrait of Michelangelo at the Uffizi holds hint that the Pope had met his match.

Julius II. galled the young sculptor by months of delay, then decided upon a magnificent monument to himself, to be raised during his lifetime. So, at thirty, in an astoundingly rapid time, Michelangelo placed the design before the delighted Pope, who straightway sent him off to Carrara to quarry the marble ; and so eager was the sculptor to begin upon his huge task, that, in the eight months at Carrara, he blocked out two of the figures for the Tomb. [216] Back in Rome by November, he started upon the great Tomb in the large workshop of the home by the Vatican that the Pope put at his service, who had a drawbridge thrown across from the Corridore to the sculptor's rooms that he might visit him whilst at work, and who poured favours upon him. The Tomb was never to be completed in its vast original design ; indeed, source as it was of many of Michelangelo's great masterpieces, it was to become a curse in his life.

The huge monument, on a base of 34 by 23 feet, and raised, roughly speaking, as a cube and a half, was too large to set into St. Peter's Church, whereupon the dauntless Julius promptly ordered the rebuilding of the church on a vast and magnificent scale by Bramante. All looked smiling for Michelangelo, who flung himself into his beloved task with hot enthusiasm. But he was to suffer chill. There came a day when a load of marble being sent from Carrara, and the Pope being engaged in affairs of State, Michelangelo paid the freight and porterage out of his own pocket. His efforts to see the Pope, and to get the money repaid, were met by cunning evasions of the Pope to see him, and at last by an order that Michelangelo was not to be allowed into the presence of His Holiness, who was deeply involved in money difficulties over his wars. The sculptor was not of the temper to brook the treachery. His pride deeply wounded, Michelangelo burst into a fury of passion, and with a contemptuous " henceforward the Pope must look for me elsewhere if he wants me," he got to horse and made for Florence, where he brooded on his wrongs, disdainful of the five pursuing messengers sent in hot pursuit by the Pope.

Thus the curtain came down on the first act of that " tragedy of the tomb " that was to darken Michelangelo's [217] life. Well might Michelangelo write, " I am thy drudge, and have been from my youth . . . yet of my dear time's waste thou think'st no ill ; the more I toil, the less I move thy pity. Once 'twas my hope to raise me by thy height." Neither the threats of the Pope nor the anxious urging of the sculptor's friend, Piero Soderini, who was thoroughly alarmed by the repeated orders of the Pope to send back the artist by fair means or by force, could move Michelangelo. But, meanwhile, Julius II., having subdued Perugia, entered Bologna in triumph on the 11th of the November of 1506 ; and was scarce settled in the town before he sent to the Signoria of Florence demanding that Michelangelo should be sent to Bologna. Michelangelo went, " like a man with a halter about his neck " ; only to find himself hailed with rejoicing by the Pope, who straightway, before he left for Rome, set him to work upon the great bronze statue of himself to be set up in front of the church of San Petronio-that statue, finished in the February of 1508, which showed the Pope seated, with one hand raised, and of which the Pope asked, when it was set up, whether he was supposed to be blessing or cursing the people of Bologna, and was met by Michelangelo's deft reply : " Your Holiness is threatening this people, if it be not wise "- that statue which, wrought out of a year and a half of Michelangelo's genius, was flung down by the Bolognese when Bentivogli drove the Papal Legate out of the town, when the bronze was melted down and cast into a huge cannon that the jesting citizens nicknamed " La Giulia."

Michelangelo, back in Florence in March, and relieved by his father on the 13th of that month in 1508, his thirty-third year, from parental authority, was for settling in his native city, and orders were pouring in upon him, when the Pope again called him to Rome.

[218] Michelangelo set foot in Rome for the second time, his heart fixed on the completion of the great Tomb, only to find that cunning rivals had worked upon the aged Pontiff's superstition of the ill-luck in having a tomb made during his lifetime-covering all risk of being considered jealous by maliciously suggesting Michelangelo's painting the vault of the Sistine Chapel instead-not realising his hidden great qualities as painter. It is grown into a habit to pooh-pooh the likelihood of this motive. But there is not a shred of solid evidence to disprove it. The whole Renaissance was befouled through and through with bitter rivalries, that flinched neither from scruple nor murder to attain the vilest ends. And in no place was this vileness more murderous and deadly than in the home of the Popes. It reached to, and sullied, the very High Altar of its beautiful creed. Michelangelo stated the truth mildly when he wrote that " all the disagreements which I have had with Pope Julius have been brought about by the envy of Bramante and of Raphael of Urbino," who were the cause of his monument not being finished during his lifetime.

Michelangelo hesitated. He did not consider himself a painter. He knew nothing of the craft of fresco-painting. He felt unfitted for the task. But the Pope doggedly pressed. So it came that on the l0th of the May of 1508, with great reluctance, Michelangelo entered upon the work of painting the Decorations of the Sistine Chapel, which are amongst the supreme artistic achievements of the hand and brain of mortal men.

The Sistine Chapel was built for the especial use of the Popes ; in it takes place the scrutiny of the ballot for the election of the Pope by the Conclave of Cardinals.

He faced a colossal task ; and once having entered upon it, he flinched from nothing. To aid him in the craftsmanship [219] of fresco, he called in six Florentine painters, among them his friends Francesco Granacci and Giuliano Bugiardini, who, however, could not reach the majestic ideals that Michelangelo set them ; he bore with them until the January of 1509 ; sent them away ; and, blotting out what painting they had done, shut himself up in the chapel to tackle with his own hands his vast enterprise. Alone, painting upwards upon the great vault of the ceiling in a strained position, the fresco dripping on to his face, distressed in mind and with terrible fatigue of the cramped body, without a friend with whom to hold communion, scarce giving himself time for food, he had created by the end of the October of 1509, in about nine months, hundreds of figures, some ten feet in stature ; since we know that the impetuous Pope insisted on having this portion of the work uncovered on the 1st of November 1509, that he might see it, though not complete ; and three years afterwards, on the 1st of November 1512, at the hot insistence of the Pope, who had already threatened to have him flung down from the scaffolding if he did not hasten the work, and at last struck him with his cane, Michelangelo uncovered it, though unfinished, to the Pope's wild admiration. The whole of Rome, led by the Pope, who indeed rushed to the chapel " before the dust raised by the taking down of the scaffolding had settled," flocked to see the great achievement which is the supreme work of the Italian Renaissance, the sublime and majestic utterance of its art.

Michelangelo complained that the impatience of the Pope prevented his finishing his work as he would have desired. Yet the vast performance could scarce have been bettered. Taking a stupendous subject, this man, who alone in all his age had the power to utter that subject with art prodigious enough to pronounce its sublime music, [220] wrought the full intensity of it all with a tragic force with which no other man has ever been gifted. In those few years, working alone, he achieved an intensity of emotional utterance in which he gave forth the significance of the Creation of the World, the Fall of Man, the Flood, the Second Entry of Sin into the World, in nine great spaces upon the centre of the ceiling, which have only been equalled in sustained power and dignity of utterance by the English translators of the Bible. Continuing his vast drama, he uttered the need for Salvation, foretold by the Prophets and Sibyls, the majestic dignity of whose figures are the wonder of the ages ; and he wrought throughout his scheme the great groups of the ancestors of the Mother of Christ. He painted twenty superb nude figures of Athletes, of which any one would have established the genius of any painter. He had set his heart on the creation of the great Tomb : baffled in his vast ambition, he put forth his hand to do in painting what he had been denied in sculpture, and, treating the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as though he carved it with the chisel of his astounding craftsmanship in sculpture, he raised in paint a mighty temple towards the heavens-the simplicity of sculpture is over it all, the human figure he glorified in paint employed with a hand that wrought the will of a sculptor's eyes. And he who looks upon this wondrous work of a man's hand may realise, as though Michelangelo had created it in solid marble, what that Tomb would have been which he was thwarted in wholly achieving-may guess in some fashion what were the deeps of the grief that tortured the soul of this genius of a man whose mighty poem in carven marble was buried like a splendid dream in the baffled hopes that were flung to the ground in the " tragedy of the tomb."