ggesting no lack of strength, but subordinating the idea
of physical power to that of a refined and spiritual nature. Nothing
can be more lovely than the hands, the feet, the arms, relaxed in
slumber. Death becomes immortally beautiful in that recumbent figure,
from which the insults of the scourge, the cross, the brutal lance
have been erased. Michelangelo did not seek to excite pity or to stir
devotion by having recourse to those mediaeval ideas which were so
passionately expressed in S. Bernard's hymn to the Crucified. The
aesthetic tone of his dead Christ is rather that of some sweet solemn
strain of cathedral music, some motive from a mass of Palestrina or a
Passion of Sebastian Bach. Almost involuntarily there rises to the
memory that line composed by Bion for the genius of earthly loveliness
bewailed by everlasting beauty--

_E'en as a corpse he is fair, fair corpse as fallen aslumber._

It is said that certain Lombards passing by and admiring the Pieta
ascribed it to Christoforo Solari of Milan, surnamed Il Gobbo.
Michelangelo, having happened to overhear them, shut himself up in the
chapel, and engraved the belt upon the Madonna's breast with his own
name. This he never did with any other of his works.

This masterpiece of highest art combined with pure religious feeling
was placed in the old Basilica of S. Peter's, in a chapel dedicated to
Our Lady of the Fever, Madonna della Febbre. Here, on the night of
August 19, 1503, it witnessed one of those horrid spectacles which in
Italy at that period so often intervened to interrupt the rhythm of
romance and beauty and artistic melody. The dead body of Roderigo
Borgia, Alexander VI., lay in state from noon onwards in front of the
high altar; but since "it was the most repulsive, monstrous, and
deformed corpse which had ever yet been seen, without any form or
figure of humanity, shame compelled them to partly cover it." "Late in
the evening it was transferred to the chapel of Our Lady of the Fever,
and deposited in a corner by six hinds or porters and two carpenters,
who had made the coffin too narrow and too short. Joking and jeering,
they stripped the tiara and the robes of office from the body, wrapped
it up in an old carpet, and then with force of fists and feet rammed
it down into the box, without torches, without a ministering priest,
without a single person to attend and bear a consecrated candle." Of
such sort was the vigil kept by this solemn statue, so