[312] See Michael Angelo’s letters to Giovan Francesco Fattucci, and his family.  Gotti, pp. 55-65.

[313] See the sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoja:—­

             La mia pittura morta
    Difendi orma’, Giovanni, e ’l mio onore,
    Non sendo in loco bon, ne io pittore.

[314] According to the first plan, Michael Angelo bargained with the Pope for twelve Apostles in the lunettes, and another part to be filled with ornament in the usual manner—­“dodici Apostoli nelle lunette, e ’l resto un certo partimento ripieno d’ adornamenti come si usa.”  Michael Angelo, after making designs for this commission, told the Pope he thought the roof would look poor, because the Apostles were poor folk—­“perche furon poveri anche loro.”  He then began his cartoons for the vault as it now exists.  See the letter to Ser Giovan Francesco Fattucci, in the Archivio Buonarroti, Milanesi, pp. 426-427.  This seems to be the foundation for an old story of the Pope’s complaining that the Sistine roof looked poor without gilding, and Michael Angelo’s reply that the Biblical personages depicted there were but poor people.

[315] Bramante, the Pope’s architect, did in truth fail to construct the proper scaffolding, whether through inability or jealousy.  Michael Angelo designed a superior system of his own, which became a model for future architects in similar constructions.

[316] See chapters vi. vii. and viii. of Mr. Charles Heath Wilson’s admirable Life of Michel Angelo.  Aurelio Gotti’s Vita di Michel Agnolo, and Anton Springer’s Michael Agnolo in Rome, deserve to be consulted on this passage in the painter’s biography.

[317] The conditions under which Michael Angelo worked, without a trained band of pupils, must have struck contemporaries, accustomed to Raphael’s crowds of assistants, with a wonder that justified Vasari’s emphatic language of exaggeration as to his single-handed labour.

[318] In speaking of the Sistine I have treated Michael Angelo as a sculptor, and it was a sculptor who designed those frescoes. Ne io pittore is his own phrase.  Compare an autotype of “Adam” in the Sistine with one of “Twilight” in S. Lorenzo:  it is clear that in the former Michael Angelo painted what he would have been well pleased to carve.  A sculptor’s genius was needed for the modelling of those many figures; it was, moreover, not a painter’s part to deal thus drily with colour.

[319] The Laurentian Library, however, was built in 1524.

[320] See Gotti, pp. 150, 155, 158, 159, for the correspondence which passed upon the subject, and the various alterations in the plan.  As in the case of all Michael Angelo’s works, except the Sistine, only a small portion of the original project was executed.

[321] Cosimo de’ Medici found it impossible to induce him to return to Florence.  See B. Cellini’s Life, p. 436, for his way of receiving the Duke’s overtures.