The Cappella Paolina ran a risk of destruction by fire during the course of his operations there.  Michelangelo wrote to Del Riccio in 1545, reminding him that part of the roof had been consumed, and that it would be necessary to cover it in roughly at once, since the rain was damaging the frescoes and weakening the walls.  When they were finished, Paul III. appointed an official guardian with a fixed salary, whose sole business it should be “to clean the frescoes well and keep them in a state of cleanliness, free from dust and other impurities, as also from the smoke of candles lighted in both chapels during divine service.”  This man had charge of the Sistine as well as the Pauline Chapel; but his office does not seem to have been continued after the death of the Farnese.  The first guardian nominated was Buonarroti’s favourite servant Urbino.

Vasari, after describing these frescoes in some detail, but without his customary enthusiasm, goes on to observe:  “Michelangelo attended only, as I have elsewhere said, to the perfection of art.  There are no landscapes, nor trees, nor houses; nor again do we find in his work that variety of movement and prettiness which may be noticed in the pictures of other men.  He always neglected such decoration, being unwilling to lower his lofty genius to these details.”  This is indeed true of the arid desert of the Pauline frescoes.  Then he adds:  “They were his last productions in painting.  He was seventy-five years old when he carried them to completion; and, as he informed me, he did so with great effort and fatigue—­painting, after a certain age, and especially fresco-painting, not being in truth fit work for old men.”

The first of two acute illnesses, which showed that Michelangelo’s constitution was beginning to give way, happened in the summer of 1544.  On this occasion Luigi del Riccio took him into his own apartments at the Casa Strozzi; and here he nursed him with such personal devotion that the old man afterwards regarded Del Riccio as the saviour of his life.  We learn this from the following pathetic sonnet:—­

  It happens that the sweet unfathomed sea
    Of seeming courtesy sometimes doth hide
    Offence to life and honour.  This descried,
    I hold less dear the health restored to me. 
  He who lends wings of hope, while secretly
    He spreads a traitorous snare by the wayside,
    Hath dulled the flame of love, and mortified
    Friendship where friendship burns most fervently. 
  Keep then, my dear Luigi, clear and fare,
    That ancient love to which my life I owe,
    That neither wind nor storm its calm may mar. 
  For wrath and pain our gratitude obscure;
    And if the truest truth of love I know,
    One pang outweighs a thousand pleasures far.