I think it necessary to make these suggestions, because, in my opinion, Michelangelo’s inner life and his literary proclivities have been hitherto too much neglected in the scheme of his psychology.  Dazzled by the splendour of his work, critics are content to skip spaces of months and years, during which the creative genius of the man smouldered.  It is, as I shall try to show, in those intervals, dimly revealed to us by what remains of his poems and his correspondence, that the secret of this man, at once so tardy and so energetic; has to be discovered.

A great master of a different temperament, less solitary, less saturnine, less sluggish, would have formed a school, as Raffaello did.  Michelangelo formed no school, and was incapable of confiding the execution of his designs to any subordinates.  This is also a point of the highest importance to insist upon.  Had he been other than he was—­a gregarious man, contented with the a peu pres in art—­he might have sent out all those twelve Apostles for the Duomo from his workshop.  Raffaello would have done so; indeed, the work which bears his name in Rome could not have existed except under these conditions.  Now nothing is left to us of the twelve Apostles except a rough-hewn sketch of S. Matthew.  Michelangelo was unwilling or unable to organise a band of craftsmen fairly interpretative of his manner.  When his own hand failed, or when he lost the passion for his labour, he left the thing unfinished.  And much of this incompleteness in his life-work seems to me due to his being what I called a dreamer.  He lacked the merely business faculty, the power of utilising hands and brains.  He could not bring his genius into open market, and stamp inferior productions with his countersign.  Willingly he retired into the solitude of his own self, to commune with great poets and to meditate upon high thoughts, while he indulged the emotions arising from forms of strength and beauty presented to his gaze upon the pathway of experience.

CHAPTER IV

I

Among the many nephews whom Sixtus IV. had raised to eminence, the most distinguished was Giuliano della Rovere, Cardinal of S. Pietro in Vincoli, and Bishop of Ostia.  This man possessed a fiery temper, indomitable energy, and the combative instinct which takes delight in fighting for its own sake.  Nature intended him for a warrior; and, though circumstances made him chief of the Church, he discharged his duties as a Pontiff in the spirit of a general and a conqueror.  When Julius II. was elected in November 1503, it became at once apparent that he intended to complete what his hated predecessors, the Borgias, had begun, by reducing to his sway all the provinces over which the See of Rome had any claims, and creating a central power in Italy.  Unlike the Borgias, however, he entertained no plan of raising his own family to