When the scaffolding was at last removed, the artist thought for a time he had done his last work.  The unnatural positions he had been obliged to take had so strained the muscles of his neck that on the street he had often to look straight up at the sky to rest himself, and things on a straight line in front he could not distinguish.  Eyes, muscles, hands, refused to act normally.

“My life is there on the ceiling of the Chapel of Sixtus,” he said.

He was then thirty-nine years old.

Fifty eventful years of life and work were yet before him.

* * * * *

When Pope Julius died, in Fifteen Hundred Thirteen, Leo the Tenth, a son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was called to take his place.  We might suppose that Leo would have remembered with pride the fact that it was his father who gave Michelangelo his first start in life, and have treated the great artist in the way Lorenzo would, were he then alive.  But the retiring, abstemious habits of Michelangelo did not appeal to Leo.  The handsome and gracious Raphael was his favorite, and at the expense of Michelangelo, Raphael was petted, feted and advanced.  Hence arose that envious rivalry between these two great men, which reveals each in a light far from pleasant—­just as if Rome were not big enough for both.  The pontificate of Leo the Tenth lasted just ten years.  On account of the lack of encouragement Michelangelo received, it seems the most fruitless season of his whole life.

Clement the Seventh, another member of the Medici family, succeeded Leo.  Clement was too sensible of Michelangelo’s merit to allow him to rust out his powers in petty tasks.  He conceived the idea of erecting a chapel to be attached to the church of San Lorenzo, at Florence, to be the final resting-place of the great members of the Medici family.  Michelangelo planned and built the chapel and for it wrought six great pieces of art.  These are the statues of Lorenzo de Medici, father of Catherine de Medici (who was such a large, black blot on the page of history); a statue of Giuliano de Medici (whose name lives now principally because Michelangelo made this statue); and the four colossal reclining figures known as “Night,” “Morning,” “Dawn” and “Twilight.”  This chapel is now open to the public, and no visitor at Florence should miss seeing it.

The statue of Lorenzo must ever rank as one of the world’s masterpieces.  The Italians call it “Il Pensiero.”  The sullen strength of the attitude gives one a vague ominous impulse to get away.  Some one has said that it fulfils Milton’s conception of Satan brooding over his plans for the ruin of mankind.

In Fifteen Hundred Twenty-seven, while Michelangelo was working on the chapel, Florence was attacked and sacked by the Constable de Bourbon.  The Medici family was again expelled, and from the leisurely decoration of a church in honor of the gentle Christ, the artist was called upon to build barricades to protect his native city.  His ingenuity as an engineer was as consummate as his exquisite idea of harmony, and for nine months the city was defended.