the plastic and
assimilative genius of a Raphael.

CHAPTER III

I

Michelangelo returned to Florence in the spring of 1501. Condivi says
that domestic affairs compelled him to leave Rome, and the
correspondence with his father makes this not improbable. He brought a
heightened reputation back to his native city. The Bacchus and the
Madonna della Febbre had placed him in advance of any sculptor of his
time. Indeed, in these first years of the sixteenth century he may be
said to have been the only Tuscan sculptor of commanding eminence.
Ghiberti, Della Quercia, Brunelleschi, Donatello, all had joined the
majority before his birth. The second group of distinguished
craftsmen--Verocchio, Luca della Robbia, Rossellino, Da Maiano,
Civitali, Desiderio da Settignano--expired at the commencement of the
century. It seemed as though a gap in the ranks of plastic artists had
purposely been made for the entrance of a predominant and tyrannous
personality. Jacopo Tatti, called Sansovino, was the only man who
might have disputed the place of preeminence with Michelangelo, and
Sansovino chose Venice for the theatre of his life-labours. In these
circumstances, it is not singular that commissions speedily began to
overtax the busy sculptor's power of execution. I do not mean to
assert that the Italians, in the year 1501, were conscious of
Michelangelo's unrivalled qualities, or sensitive to the corresponding
limitations which rendered these qualities eventually baneful to the
evolution of the arts; but they could not help feeling that in this
young man of twenty-six they possessed a first-rate craftsman, and one
who had no peer among contemporaries.

The first order of this year came from the Cardinal Francesco
Piccolomini, who was afterwards elected Pope in 1503, and who died
after reigning three weeks with the title of Pius III. He wished to
decorate the Piccolomini Chapel in the Duomo of Siena with fifteen
statues of male saints. A contract was signed on June 5, by which
Michelangelo agreed to complete these figures within the space of
three years. One of them, a S. Francis, had been already begun by
Piero Torrigiano; and this, we have some reason to believe, was
finished by the master's hand. Accounts differ about his share in the
remaining fourteen statues; but the matter is of no great moment,
seeing that the style of the work is conventional, and the scale of
the figures disagreeably squat and dumpy. It seems almost i