He proceeds to notice that the building work at S. Lorenzo is being carried forward very slowly, and money spent upon it with increasing parsimony.  Still he has his pension and his house; and these imply no small disbursements.  He cannot make out what the Pope’s real wishes are.  If he did but know Clement’s mind, he would sacrifice everything to please him.  “Only if I could obtain permission to begin something either here or in Rome, for the tomb of Julius, I should be extremely glad; for, indeed, I desire to free myself from that obligation more than to live.”  The letter closes on a note of sadness:  “If I am unable to write what you will understand, do not be surprised, for I have lost my wits entirely.”

After this we hear nothing more about the tomb in Michelangelo’s correspondence till the year 1531.  During the intervening years Italy was convulsed by the sack of Rome, the siege of Florence, and the French campaigns in Lombardy and Naples.  Matters only began to mend when Charles V. met Clement at Bologna in 1530, and established the affairs of the peninsula upon a basis which proved durable.  That fatal lustre (1526-1530) divided the Italy of the Renaissance from the Italy of modern times with the abruptness of an Alpine watershed.  Yet Michelangelo, aged fifty-one in 1526, was destined to live on another thirty-eight years, and, after the death of Clement, to witness the election of five successive Popes.  The span of his life was not only extraordinary in its length, but also in the events it comprehended.  Born in the mediaeval pontificate of Sixtus IV., brought up in the golden days of Lorenzo de’ Medici, he survived the Franco-Spanish struggle for supremacy, watched the progress of the Reformation, and only died when a new Church and a new Papacy had been established by the Tridentine Council amid states sinking into the repose of decrepitude.

VI

We must return from this digression and resume the events of Michelangelo’s life in 1525.

The first letter to Sebastiano del Piombo is referred to April of that year.  He says that a picture, probably the portrait of Anton Francesco degli Albizzi, is eagerly expected at Florence.  When it arrived in May, he wrote again under the influence of generous admiration for his friend’s performance:  “Last evening our friend the Captain Cuio and certain other gentlemen were so kind as to invite me to sup with them.  This gave me exceeding great pleasure, since it drew me forth a little from my melancholy, or shall we call it my mad mood.  Not only did I enjoy the supper, which was most agreeable, but far more the conversation.  Among the topics discussed, what gave me most delight was to hear your name mentioned by the Captain; nor was this all, for he still added to my pleasure, nay, to a superlative degree, by saying that, in the art of painting he held you to be sole and without peer in the whole world, and that so you were esteemed at Rome.  I could not have been better pleased.  You see that my judgment is confirmed; and so you must not deny that you are peerless, when I write it, since I have a crowd of witnesses to my opinion.  There is a picture too of yours here, God be praised, which wins credence for me with every one who has eyes.”