nually urging
him to finish it. One of his reasons for attacking the block had been
to keep himself in health by exercise. Accordingly he hewed away with
fury, and bit so deep into the marble that he injured one of the
Madonna's elbows. When this happened, it was his invariable practice
to abandon the piece he had begun upon, feeling that an incomplete
performance was preferable to a lame conclusion. In his old age he
suffered from sleeplessness; and it was his habit to rise from bed and
work upon the Pieta, wearing a thick paper cap, in which he placed a
lighted candle made of goat's tallow. This method of chiselling by the
light of one candle must have complicated the technical difficulties
of his labour. But what we may perhaps surmise to have been his final
motive for the rejection of the work, was a sense of his inability,
with diminished powers of execution, and a still more vivid sense of
the importance of the motive, to accomplish what the brain conceived.
The hand failed. The imagination of the subject grew more intimate and
energetic. Losing patience then at last, he took a hammer and began to
break the group up. Indeed, the right arm of the Mary shows a
fracture. The left arm of the Christ is mutilated in several places.
One of the nipples has been repaired, and the hand of the Madonna
resting on the breast above it is cracked across. It would have been
difficult to reduce the whole huge block to fragments; and when the
work of destruction had advanced so far, Michelangelo's servant
Antonio, the successor to Urbino, begged the remnants from his master.
Tiberio Calcagni was a good friend of Buonarroti's at this time. He
heard that Francesco Bandini, a Florentine settled in exile at Rome,
earnestly desired some relic of the master's work. Accordingly,
Calgagni, with Michelangelo's consent, bought the broken marble from
Antonio for 200 crowns, pieced it together, and began to mend it.
Fortunately, he does not seem to have elaborated the surface in any
important particular; for both the finished and unfinished parts bear
indubitable marks of Michelangelo's own handling. After the death of
Calcagni and Bandini, the Pieta remained for some time in the garden
of Antonio, Bandini's heir, at Montecavallo. It was transferred to
Florence, and placed among the marbles used in erecting the new
Medicean Chapel, until at last, in 1722, the Grand Duke Cosimo III.
finally set it up behind the altar of the Duomo.

Vasari adds