iterkeit" and "Allgemeinheit" were beyond his
reach.

Michael Angelo left the tombs of the Medici unfinished; nor, in spite of
Duke Cosimo's earnest entreaties, would he afterwards return to Florence
to complete them. Lorenzo's features are but rough-hewn; so is the face of
Night. Day seems struggling into shape beneath his mask of rock, and
Twilight shows everywhere the tooth-dint of the chisel. To leave
unfinished was the fate of Michael Angelo--partly too, perhaps, his
preference; for he was easily deterred from work. Many of his marbles are
only just begun. The two medallion "Madonnas," the "Madonna and Child" in
S. Lorenzo, the "Head of Brutus," the "Bound Captives," and the "Pieta" in
the Duomo of Florence, are instances of masterpieces in the rough. He
loved to fancy that the form dwelt within the stone, and that the chisel
disencumbered it of superfluity. Therefore, to his eye, foreseeing what
the shape would be when the rude envelope was chipped away, the marble
mask may have taken the appearance of a veil or mantle. He may have found
some fascination in the incompleteness that argued want of will but not of
art, and a rough-hewn Madonna may have been to him what a Dryad still
enclosed within a gnarled 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