connected with the tomb vigorously forward, employing numerous workpeople, and ordering supplies of marble.  In fact, the greater part of what remains to us of the unfinished monument may be ascribed to this period of comparatively uninterrupted labour.  Michelangelo had his workshop in the Macello de’ Corvi, but we know very little about the details of his life there.  His correspondence happens to be singularly scanty between the years 1513 and 1516.  One letter, however, written in May 1518, to the Capitano of Cortona throws a ray of light upon this barren tract of time, and introduces an artist of eminence, whose intellectual affinity to Michelangelo will always remain a matter of interest.  “While I was at Rome, in the first year of Pope Leo, there came the Master Luca Signorelli of Cortona, painter.  I met him one day near Monte Giordano, and he told me that he was come to beg something from the Pope, I forget what:  he had run the risk of losing life and limb for his devotion to the house of Medici, and now it seemed they did not recognise him:  and so forth, saying many things I have forgotten.  After these discourses, he asked me for forty giulios [a coin equal in value to the more modern paolo, and worth perhaps eight shillings of present money], and told me where to send them to, at the house of a shoemaker, his lodgings.  I not having the money about me, promised to send it, and did so by the hand of a young man in my service, called Silvio, who is still alive and in Rome, I believe.  After the lapse of some days, perhaps because his business with the Pope had failed, Messer Luca came to my house in the Macello de’ Corvi, the same where I live now, and found me working on a marble statue, four cubits in height, which has the hands bound behind the back, and bewailed himself with me, and begged another forty, saying that he wanted to leave Rome.  I went up to my bedroom, and brought the money down in the presence of a Bolognese maid I kept, and I think the Silvio above mentioned was also there.  When Luca got the cash, he went away, and I have never seen him since; but I remember complaining to him, because I was out of health and could not work, and he said:  ’Have no fear, for the angels from heaven will come to take you in their arms and aid you.’” This is in several ways an interesting document.  It brings vividly before our eyes magnificent expensive Signorelli and his meanly living comrade, each of them mighty masters of a terrible and noble style, passionate lovers of the nude, devoted to masculine types of beauty, but widely and profoundly severed by differences in their personal tastes and habits.  It also gives us a glimpse into Michelangelo’s workshop at the moment when he was blocking out one of the bound Captives at the Louvre.  It seems from what follows in the letter that Michelangelo had attempted to recover the money through his brother Buonarroto, but that Signorelli refused to acknowledge his debt.  The Capitano wrote that he was sure it had been discharged.  “That,” adds Michelangelo, “is the same as calling me the biggest blackguard; and so I should be, if I wanted to get back what had been already paid.  But let your Lordship think what you like about it, I am bound to get the money, and so I swear.”  The remainder of the autograph is torn and illegible; it seems to wind up with a threat.