figures are not men, not women, but vague and potent allegories of our mortal fate.  They remain as he left them, except that parts of Giuliano’s statue, especially the hands, seem to have been worked over by an assistant.  The same is true of the Madonna, which will ever be regarded, in her imperfectly finished state, as one of the finest of his sculptural conceptions.  To Montelupo belongs the execution of S. Damiano, and to Montorsoli that of S. Cosimo.  Vasari says that Tribolo was commissioned by Michelangelo to carve statues of Earth weeping for the loss of Giuliano, and Heaven rejoicing over his spirit.  The death of Pope Clement, however, put a stop to these subordinate works, which, had they been accomplished, might perhaps have shown us how Buonarroti intended to fill the empty niches on each side of the Dukes.

When Michelangelo left Florence for good at the end of 1534, his statues had not been placed; but we have reason to think that the Dukes and the four allegorical figures were erected in his lifetime.  There is something singular in the maladjustment of the recumbent men and women to the curves of the sarcophagi, and in the contrast between the roughness of their bases and the smooth polish of the chests they rest on.  These discrepancies do not, however, offend the eye, and they may even have been deliberately adopted from a keen sense of what the Greeks called asymmetreia as an adjunct to effect.  It is more difficult to understand what he proposed to do with the Madonna and her two attendant saints.  Placed as they now are upon a simple ledge, they strike one as being too near the eye, and out of harmony with the architectural tone of the building.  It is also noticeable that the saints are more than a head taller than the Dukes, while the Madonna overtops the saints by more than another head.  We are here in a region of pure conjecture; and if I hazard an opinion, it is only thrown out as a possible solution of a now impenetrable problem.  I think, then, that Michelangelo may have meant to pose these three figures where they are, facing the altar; to raise the Madonna upon a slightly projecting bracket above the level of SS.  Damiano and Cosimo, and to paint the wall behind them with a fresco of the Crucifixion.  That he had no intention of panelling that empty space with marble may be taken for granted, considering the high finish which has been given to every part of this description of work in the chapel.  Treated as I have suggested, the statue of the Madonna, with the patron saints of the House of Medici, overshadowed by a picture of Christ’s sacrifice, would have confronted the mystery of the Mass during every celebration at the altar.  There are many designs for the Crucifixion, made by Michelangelo in later life, so lofty as almost to suggest a group of figures in the foreground, cutting the middle distance.

At the close of Michelangelo’s life the sacristy was still unfinished.  It contained the objects I have described—­the marble panelling, the altar with its candelabra, the statues of the Dukes and their attendant figures, the Madonna and two Medicean patron saints—­in fact, all that we find there now, with the addition of Giovanni da Udine’s frescoes in the cupola, the relics of which have since been buried under cold Florentine whitewash.