Of his travels I say nothing here, for we must keep to Florence, whither he thought it safe to return in 1495.  The city was now governed by the Great Council and the Medici banished.  Michelangelo remained only a brief time and then went to Rome, where he made his first Pieta, at which he was working during the trial and execution of Savonarola, whom he admired and reverenced, and where he remained until 1501, when, aged twenty-six, he returned to Florence to do some of his most famous work.  The Medici were still in exile.

It was in August, 1501, that the authorities of the cathedral asked Michelangelo to do what he could with a great block of marble on their hands, from which he carved that statue of David of which I tell the story in chapter XVI.  This established his pre-eminence as a sculptor.  Other commissions for statues poured in, and in 1504 he was invited to design a cartoon for the Palazzo Vecchio, to accompany one by Leonardo, and a studio was given him in the Via Guelfa for the purpose.  This cartoon, when finished, so far established him also as the greatest of painters that the Masaccios in the Carmine were deserted by young artists in order that this might be studied instead.  The cartoon, as I relate in the chapter on the Palazzo Vecchio, no longer exists.

The next year, 1505, Michelangelo, nearing his thirtieth birthday, returned to Rome and entered upon the second and tragic period of his life, for he arrived there only to receive the order for the Julius tomb which poisoned his remaining years, and of which more is said in the chapter on the Accademia, where we see so many vestiges of it both in marble and plaster.  But I might remark here that this vain and capricious pontiff, whose pride and indecision robbed the world of no one can ever say what glorious work from Michelangelo’s hand, is the benevolent-looking old man whose portrait by Raphael is in the Pitti and Uffizi in colour, in the Corsini Palace in charcoal, and again in our own National Gallery in colour.

Of Michelangelo at Rome and Carrara, whither he went to superintend in person the quarrying of the marble that was to be transferred to life and where he had endless vexations and mortifications, I say nothing.  Enough that the election of his boy friend Giovanni de’ Medici as Pope Leo X in 1513 brought him again to Florence, the Pope having a strong wish that Michelangelo should complete the facade of the Medici family church, S. Lorenzo, where we now are.  As we know, the scheme was not carried out, but in 1520 the Pope substituted another and more attractive one:  namely, a chapel to contain the tombs not only of his father the Magnificent, and his uncle, who had been murdered in the Duomo many years before, but also his nephew Piero de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, who had just died, in 1519, and his younger brother (and Michelangelo’s early playmate) Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours, who had died in 1516.  These were not Medici of the highest class, but family pride was strong.  It is, however, odd that no memorial of Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had been drowned at the age of twenty-two in 1503, was required; perhaps it may have been that since it was Piero’s folly that had brought the Medici into such disgrace in 1494, the less thought of him the better.