Such was the end of Pietro Urbano.  Michelangelo was certainly unfortunate with his apprentices.  One cannot help fancying he may have spoiled them by indulgence.  Vasari, mentioning Pietro, calls him “a person of talent, but one who never took the pains to work.”

Frizzi brought the Christ Triumphant into its present state, patching up what “the lither lad” from Pistoja had boggled.  Buonarroti, who was sincerely attached to Varj, and felt his artistic reputation now at stake, offered to make a new statue.  But the magnanimous Roman gentleman replied that he was entirely satisfied with the one he had received.  He regarded and esteemed it “as a thing of gold,” and, in refusing Michelangelo’s offer, added that “this proved his noble soul and generosity, inasmuch as, when he had already made what could not be surpassed and was incomparable, he still wanted to serve his friend better.”  The price originally stipulated was paid, and Varj added an autograph testimonial, strongly affirming his contentment with the whole transaction.

These details prove that the Christ of the Minerva must be regarded as a mutilated masterpiece.  Michelangelo is certainly responsible for the general conception, the pose, and a large portion of the finished surface, details of which, especially in the knees, so much admired by Sebastiano, and in the robust arms, are magnificent.  He designed the figure wholly nude, so that the heavy bronze drapery which now surrounds the loins, and bulges drooping from the left hip, breaks the intended harmony of lines.  Yet, could this brawny man have ever suggested any distinctly religious idea?  Christ, victor over Death and Hell, did not triumph by ponderosity and sinews.  The spiritual nature of his conquest, the ideality of a divine soul disencumbered from the flesh, to which it once had stooped in love for sinful man, ought certainly to have been emphasised, if anywhere through art, in the statue of a Risen Christ.  Substitute a scaling-ladder for the cross, and here we have a fine life-guardsman, stripped and posing for some classic battle-piece.  We cannot quarrel with Michelangelo about the face and head.  Those vulgarly handsome features, that beard, pomaded and curled by a barber’s ’prentice, betray no signs of his inspiration.  Only in the arrangement of the hair, hyacinthine locks descending to the shoulders, do we recognise the touch of the divine sculptor.

The Christ became very famous.  Francis I. had it cast and sent to Paris, to be repeated in bronze.  What is more strange, it has long been the object of a religious cult.  The right foot, so mangled by poor Pietro, wears a fine brass shoe, in order to prevent its being kissed away.  This almost makes one think of Goethe’s hexameter:  “Wunderthaetige Bilder sind meist nur schlechte Gemaelde.”  Still it must be remembered that excellent critics have found the whole work admirable.  Gsell-Fels says:  “It is his second Moses; in movement and physique one of the greatest masterpieces; as a Christ-ideal, the heroic conception of a humanist.”  That last observation is just.  We may remember that Vida was composing his Christiad while Frizzi was curling the beard of the Cristo Risorto.  Vida always speaks of Jesus as Heros and of God the Father as Superum Pater Nimbipotens or Regnator Olympi.