It is said that Michelangelo expressed dissatisfaction with Montelupo’s execution of the two statues finally committed to his charge, and we know from documents that the man was ill when they were finished.  Still we can hardly excuse the master himself for the cold and perfunctory performance of a task which had such animated and heroic beginnings.  Competent judges, who have narrowly surveyed the monument, say that the stones are badly put together, and the workmanship is defective in important requirements of the sculptor-mason’s craft.  Those who defend Buonarroti must fall back upon the theory that weariness and disappointment made him at last indifferent to the fate of a design which had cost him so much anxiety, pecuniary difficulties, and frustrated expectations in past years.  He let the Tomb of Julius, his first vast dream of art, be botched up out of dregs and relics by ignoble hands, because he was heart-sick and out of pocket.

As artist, Michelangelo might, one thinks, have avoided the glaring discord of styles between the upper and the lower portions of the tomb; but sensitiveness to harmony of manner lies not in the nature of men who rapidly evolve new forms of thought and feeling from some older phase.  Probably he felt the width and the depth of that gulf which divided himself in 1505 from the same self in 1545, less than we do.  Forty years in a creative nature introduce subtle changes, which react upon the spirit of the age, and provoke subsequent criticism to keen comments and comparisons.  The individual and his contemporaries are not so well aware of these discrepancies as posterity.

The Moses, which Paul and his courtiers thought sufficient to commemorate a single Pope, stands as the eminent jewel of this defrauded tomb.  We may not be attracted by it.  We may even be repelled by the goat-like features, the enormous beard, the ponderous muscles, and the grotesque garments of the monstrous statue.  In order to do it justice, Jet us bear in mind that the Moses now remains detached from a group of environing symbolic forms which Michelangelo designed.  Instead of taking its place as one among eight corresponding and counterbalancing giants, it is isolated, thrust forward on the eye; whereas it was intended to be viewed from below in concert with a scheme of balanced figures, male and female, on the same colossal scale.

Condivi writes not amiss, in harmony with the gusto of his age, and records what a gentle spirit thought about the Moses then:  “Worthy of all admiration is the statue of Moses, duke and captain of the Hebrews.  He sits posed in the attitude of a thinker and a sage, holding beneath his right arm the tables of the law, and with the left hand giving support to his chin, like one who is tired and full of anxious cares.  From the fingers of this hand escape long flowing lines of beard, which are very beautiful in their effect upon the eye.  The face is full of vivid life and spiritual force, fit to inspire both love and