or purity of style, or elegance of composition, or practical convenience, or decorative beauty, or distribution of parts.  He calls the cornice barbarous, confused, bastard in style, discordant with the rest of the building, and so ill suited to the palace as, if carried out, to threaten the walls with destruction.  This document has considerable interest, partly as illustrating Michelangelo’s views on architecture in general, and displaying a pedantry of which he was never elsewhere guilty, partly as explaining the bitter hostility aroused against him in Sangallo and the whole tribe of that great architect’s adherents.  We do not, unfortunately, possess the design upon which the report was made.  But, even granting that it must have been defective, Michelangelo, who professed that architecture was not his art, might, one thinks, have spared his rival such extremity of adverse criticism.  It exposed him to the taunts of rivals and ill-wishers; justified them in calling him presumptuous, and gave them a plausible excuse when they accused him of jealousy.  What made it worse was, that his own large building, the Laurentian Library, glaringly exhibits all the defects he discovered in Sangallo’s cornice.

I find it difficult to resist the impression that Michelangelo was responsible, to a large extent, for the ill-will of those artists whom Vasari calls “la setta Sangallesca.”  His life became embittered by their animosity, and his industry as Papal architect continued to be hampered for many years by their intrigues.  But he alone was to blame at the beginning, not so much for expressing an honest opinion, as for doing so with insulting severity.

That Michelangelo may have been right in his condemnation of Sangallo’s cornice is of course possible.  Paul himself was dissatisfied, and eventually threw that portion of the building open to competition.  Perino del Vaga, Sebastiano del Piombo, and the young Giorgio Vasari are said to have furnished designs.  Michelangelo did so also; and his plan was not only accepted, but eventually carried out.  Nevertheless Sangallo, one of the most illustrious professional architects then alive, could not but have felt deeply wounded by the treatment he received.  It was natural for his followers to exclaim that Buonarroti had contrived to oust their aged master, and to get a valuable commission into his own grasp, by the discourteous exercise of his commanding prestige in the world of art.

In order to be just to Michelangelo, we must remember that he was always singularly modest in regard to his own performances, and severe in self-criticism.  Neither in his letters nor in his poems does a single word of self-complacency escape his pen.  He sincerely felt himself to be an unprofitable servant:  that was part of his constitutional depression.  We know, too, that he allowed strong temporary feelings to control his utterance.  The cruel criticism of Sangallo may therefore have been quite devoid of malice; and if it was as well founded as the criticism of that builder’s plan for S. Peter’s, then Michelangelo stands acquitted.  Sangallo’s model exists; it is so large that you can walk inside it, and compare your own impressions with the following judgment:—­