The first order of this year came from the Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini, who was afterwards elected Pope in 1503, and who died after reigning three weeks with the title of Pius III.  He wished to decorate the Piccolomini Chapel in the Duomo of Siena with fifteen statues of male saints.  A contract was signed on June 5, by which Michelangelo agreed to complete these figures within the space of three years.  One of them, a S. Francis, had been already begun by Piero Torrigiano; and this, we have some reason to believe, was finished by the master’s hand.  Accounts differ about his share in the remaining fourteen statues; but the matter is of no great moment, seeing that the style of the work is conventional, and the scale of the figures disagreeably squat and dumpy.  It seems almost impossible that these ecclesiastical and tame pieces should have been produced at the same time as the David by the same hand.  Neither Vasari nor Condivi speaks about them, although it is certain that Michelangelo was held bound to his contract during several years.  Upon the death of Pius III., he renewed it with the Pope’s heirs, Jacopo and Andrea Piccolomini, by a deed dated September 15, 1504; and in 1537 Anton Maria Piccolomini, to whom the inheritance succeeded, considered himself Michelangelo’s creditor for the sum of a hundred crowns, which had been paid beforehand for work not finished by the sculptor.

A far more important commission was intrusted to Michelangelo in August of the same year, 1501.  Condivi, after mentioning his return to Florence, tells the history of the colossal David in these words:  “Here he stayed some time, and made the statue which stands in front of the great door of the Palace of the Signory, and is called the Giant by all people.  It came about in this way.  The Board of Works at S. Maria del Fiore owned a piece of marble nine cubits in height, which had been brought from Carrara some hundred years before by a sculptor insufficiently acquainted with his art.  This was evident, inasmuch as, wishing to convey it more conveniently and with less labour, he had it blocked out in the quarry, but in such a manner that neither he nor any one else was capable of extracting a statue from the block, either of the same size, or even on a much smaller scale.  The marble being, then, useless for any good purpose, Andrea del Monte San Savino thought that he might get possession of it from the Board, and begged them to make him a present of it, promising that he would add certain pieces of stone and carve a statue from it.  Before they made up their minds to give it, they sent for Michelangelo; then, after explaining the wishes and the views of Andrea, and considering his own opinion that it would be possible to extract a good thing from the block, they finally offered it to him.  Michelangelo accepted, added no pieces, and got the statue out so exactly, that, as any one may see, in the top of the head and at the base some vestiges of the rough