oak was to a Greek poet’s fancy.  We are not, however, justified in therefore assuming, as a recent critic has suggested, that Michael Angelo sought to realise a certain preconceived effect by want of finish.  There is enough in the distracted circumstances of his life and in his temper, at once passionate and downcast, to account for fragmentary and imperfect performance; nor must it be forgotten that the manual labour of the sculptor in the sixteenth century was by no means so light as it is now.  A decisive argument against this theory is that Buonarroti’s three most celebrated statues—­the “Pieta” in S. Peter’s, the “Moses” and the “Dawn”—­are executed with the highest polish it is possible for stone to take.[324] That he always aimed at this high finish, but often fell below it through discontent and ennui and the importunity of patrons, we have the best reason to believe.

Michael Angelo had now reached his fifty-ninth year.  Lionardo and Raphael had already passed away, and were remembered as the giants of a bygone age of gold.  Correggio was in his last year.  Andrea del Sarto was dead.  Nowhere except at Venice did Italian art still flourish; and the mundane style of Titian was not to the sculptor’s taste.  He had overlived the greatness of his country, and saw Italy in ruins.  Yet he was destined to survive another thirty years, another lifetime of Masaccio or Raphael, and to witness still worse days.  When we call Michael Angelo the interpreter of the burden and the pain of the Renaissance, we must remember this long weary old age, during which in solitude and silence he watched the extinction of Florence, the institution of the Inquisition, and the abasement of the Italian spirit beneath the tyranny of Spain.  His sonnets, written chiefly in this latter period of life, turn often on the thought of death.  His love of art yields to religious hope and fear, and he bemoans a youth and manhood spent in vanity.  Once when he injured his leg by a fall from the scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, he refused assistance, shut himself up at home, and lay waiting for deliverance in death.  His life was only saved by the forcible interference of friends.

In 1534 a new Eurystheus arose for our Hercules.  The Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, a fox by nature and infamous through his indulgence for a vicious bastard, was made Pope under the name of Paul III.[325] Michael Angelo had shed lustre on the reigns of three Popes, his predecessors.  For thirty years the Farnese had watched him with greedy eyes.  After Julius, Leo, and Clement, the time was now come for the heroic craftsman to serve Paul.  The Pope found him at work in his bottega on the tomb of Julius; for the “tragedy of the mausoleum” still dragged on.  The statue of Moses was finished.  “That,” said Paul, “is enough for one Pope.  Give me your contract with the Duke of Urbino; I will tear it.  Have I waited all these years; and now that I am Pope at last, shall I not have you for myself?