All the views I have advanced in the foregoing paragraphs as to the point at which Michelangelo abandoned this chapel, and his probable designs for its completion, are in the last resort based upon an important document penned at the instance of the Duke of Florence by Vasari to Buonarroti, not long before the old man’s death in Rome.  This epistle has so weighty a bearing upon the matter in hand that I shall here translate it.  Careful study of its fluent periods will convince an unprejudiced mind that the sacristy, as we now see it, is even less representative of its maker’s design than it was when Vasari wrote.  The frescoes of Giovanni da Udine are gone.  It will also show that the original project involved a wealth of figurative decoration, statuary, painting, stucco, which never arrived at realisation.

VII

Vasari, writing in the spring of 1562, informs Michelangelo concerning the Academy of Design founded by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, and of the Duke’s earnest desire that he should return to Florence in order that the sacristy at S. Lorenzo may be finished.  “Your reasons for not coming are accepted as sufficient.  He is therefore considering —­forasmuch as the place is being used now for religious services by day and night, according to the intention of Pope Clement—­he is considering, I say, a plan for erecting the statues which are missing in the niches above the sepulchres and the tabernacles above the doors.  The Duke then wishes that all the eminent sculptors of this academy, in competition man with man, should each of them make one statue, and that the painters in like manner should exercise their art upon the chapel.  Designs are to be prepared for the arches according to your own project, including works of painting and of stucco; the other ornaments and the pavement are to be provided; in short, he intends that the new academicians shall complete the whole imperfect scheme, in order that the world may see that, while so many men of genius still exist among us, the noblest work which was ever yet conceived on earth has not been left unfinished.  He has commissioned me to write to you and unfold his views, begging you at the same time to favour him by communicating to himself or to me what your intentions were, or those of the late Pope Clement, with regard to the name and title of the chapel; moreover, to inform us what designs you made for the four tabernacles on each side of the Dukes Lorenzo and Giuliano; also what you projected for the eight statues above the doors and in the tabernacles of the corners; and, finally, what your idea was of the paintings to adorn the flat walls and the semicircular spaces of the chapel.  He is particularly anxious that you should be assured of his determination to alter nothing you have already done or planned, but, on the contrary, to carry out the whole work according to your own conception.  The academicians too are unanimous