for him no practical importance.  The drawings of the tomb, the sketch of the facade, prove that in architecture he was still a novice.  Hitherto, he regarded building as the background to sculpture, or the surface on which frescoes might be limned.  To achieve anything great in this new sphere implied for him a severe course of preliminary studies.  It depends upon our final estimate of Michelangelo as an architect whether we regard the three years spent in Leo’s service for S. Lorenzo as wasted.  Being what he was, it is certain that, when the commission had been given, and he determined to attack his task alone, the man set himself down to grasp the principles of construction.  There was leisure enough for such studies in the years during which we find him moodily employed among Tuscan quarries.  The question is whether this strain upon his richly gifted genius did not come too late.  When called to paint the Sistine, he complained that painting was no art of his.  He painted, and produced a masterpiece; but sculpture still remained the major influence in all he wrought there.  Now he was bidden to quit both sculpture and painting for another field, and, as Vasari hints, he would not work under the guidance of men trained to architecture.  The result was that Michelangelo applied himself to building with the full-formed spirit of a figurative artist.  The obvious defects and the salient qualities of all he afterwards performed as architect seem due to the forced diversion of his talent at this period to a type of art he had not properly assimilated.  Architecture was not the natural mistress of his spirit.  He bent his talents to her service at a Pontiff’s word, and, with the honest devotion to work which characterised the man, he produced renowned monuments stamped by his peculiar style.  Nevertheless, in building, he remains a sublime amateur, aiming at scenical effect, subordinating construction to decoration, seeking ever back toward opportunities for sculpture or for fresco, and occasionally (as in the cupola of S. Peter’s) hitting upon a thought beyond the reach of inferior minds.

The paradox implied in this diversion of our hero from the path he ought to have pursued may be explained in three ways.  First, he had already come to be regarded as a man of unique ability, from whom everything could be demanded.  Next, it was usual for the masters of the Renaissance, from Leo Battista Alberti down to Raffaello da Urbino and Lionardo da Vinci, to undertake all kinds of technical work intrusted to their care by patrons.  Finally, Michelangelo, though he knew that sculpture was his goddess, and never neglected her first claim upon his genius, felt in him that burning ambition for greatness, that desire to wrestle with all forms of beauty and all depths of science, which tempted him to transcend the limits of a single art and try his powers in neighbour regions.  He was a man born to aim at all, to dare all, to embrace all, to leave his personality deep-trenched on all the provinces of art he chose to traverse.