There are four rough-hewn male figures, eccentrically wrought into the rock-work of a grotto in the Boboli Gardens, which have been assigned to the Tomb of Julius.  This attribution involves considerable difficulties.  In the first place, the scale is different, and the stride of one of them, at any rate, is too wide for the pedestals of that monument.  Then their violent contortions and ponderous adult forms seem to be at variance with the spirit of the Captives.  Mr. Heath Wilson may perhaps be right in his conjecture that Michelangelo began them for the sculptural decoration on the facade of S. Lorenzo.  Their incompleteness baffles criticism; yet we feel instinctively that they were meant for the open air and for effect at a considerable distance.  They remind us of Deucalion’s men growing out of the stones he threw behind his back.  We could not wish them to be finished, or to lose their wild attraction, as of primeval beings, the remnants of dim generations nearer than ourselves to elemental nature.  No better specimens of Buonarroti’s way of working in the marble could be chosen.  Almost savage hatchings with the point blend into finer touches from the toothed chisel; and here and there the surface has been treated with innumerable smoothing lines that round it into skin and muscle.  To a man who chiselled thus, marble must have yielded like softest freestone beneath his tools; and how recklessly he wrought is clear from the defective proportions of one old man’s figure, whose leg below the knee is short beyond all excuse.

A group of two figures, sometimes called the Victory, now in the Bargello Palace, was catalogued without hesitation by Vasari among the statues for the tomb.  A young hero, of gigantic strength and height, stands firmly poised upon one foot, while his other leg, bent at the knee, crushes the back of an old man doubled up beneath him.  In the face of the vanquished warrior critics have found a resemblance to Michelangelo.  The head of the victorious youth seems too small for his stature, and the features are almost brutally vacuous, though burning with an insolent and carnal beauty.  The whole forcible figure expresses irresistible energy and superhuman litheness combined with massive strength.  This group cannot be called pleasing, and its great height renders it almost inconceivable that it was meant to range upon one monument with the Captives of the Louvre.  There are, however, so many puzzles and perplexities connected with that design in its several stages, that we dare affirm or deny nothing concerning it.  M. Guillaume, taking it for granted that the Victory was intended for the tomb, makes the plausible suggestion that some of the peculiarities which render it in composition awkward, would have been justified by the addition of bronze wings.  Mr. Heath Wilson, seeking after an allegory, is fain to believe that it represents Michelangelo’s own state of subjection while employed upon the Serravezza quarries.