Julius ordered the sculptor to prepare his mausoleum.  Michael Angelo asked, “Where am I to place it?” Julius replied, “In S. Peter’s.”  But the old basilica of Christendom was too small for this ambitious pontiff’s sepulchre, designed by the audacious artist.  It was therefore decreed that a new S. Peter’s should be built to hold it.  In this way the two great labours of Buonarroti’s life were mapped out for him in a moment.  But, by a strange contrariety of fate, to Bramante and San Gallo fell respectively the planning and the spoiling of S. Peter’s.  It was only in extreme old age that Michael Angelo crowned it with that world’s miracle, the dome.  The mausoleum, to form a canopy for which the building was designed, dwindled down at last to the statue of “Moses” thrust out of the way in the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli.  “La tragedia della Sepoltura,” as Condivi aptly terms the history of Giulio’s monument, began thus in 1505 and dragged on till 1545.[304] Rarely did Michael Angelo undertake a work commensurate with his creative power, but something came to interrupt its execution; while tasks outside his sphere, for which he never bargained—­the painting of the Sistine Chapel, the facade of S. Lorenzo, the fortification of Samminiato—­were thrust upon him in the midst of other more congenial labours.  What we possess of his achievement, is a torso of his huge designs.

Giulio’s tomb, as he conceived it, would have been the most stupendous monument of sculpture in the world.[305] That mountain of marble covered with figures wrought in stone and bronze, was meant to be the sculptured poem of the thought of Death; no mere apotheosis of Pope Julius, but a pageant of the soul triumphant over the limitations of mortality.  All that dignifies humanity—­arts, sciences, and laws; the victory that crowns heroic effort; the majesty of contemplation, and the energy of action—­was symbolised upon ascending tiers of the great pyramid; while the genii of heaven and earth upheld the open tomb, where lay the dead man waiting for the Resurrection.  Of this gigantic scheme only one imperfect drawing now remains.[306] The “Moses” and the “Bound Captives"[307] are all that Michael Angelo accomplished.  For forty years the “Moses” remained in his workshop.  For forty years he cherished a hope that his plan might still in part be executed, complaining the while that it would have been better for him to have made sulphur matches all his life than to have taken up the desolating artist’s trade.  “Every day,” he cries, “I am stoned as though I had crucified Christ.  My youth has been lost, bound hand and foot to this tomb."[308] It was decreed apparently that Michael Angelo should exist for after ages as a fragment; and such might Pheidias among the Greeks have been, if he had worked for ephemeral Popes and bankrupt princes instead of Pericles.  Italy in the sixteenth century, dislocated, distracted, and drained of her material resources, gave no opportunity to artists for the creation of monuments colossal in their unity.