Michael Angelo brought artists from Florence to help him in his great
undertaking, for over the chapel, whose walls had already been painted
by older artists--among them Ghirlandajo, was an enormous vault of 150
feet in length by 50 in breadth, which Michael Angelo was required to
cover with designs representing the Fall and Redemption of Man. But the
painter was unable to bear what seemed to him the bungling attempts of
his assistants; so dismissing them all and destroying their work, he
shut himself up, and working in solitude and secrecy, set himself to
evolve from his own inner consciousness the gigantic scenes of a
tremendous drama. In 22 months (or, as Kugler holds, in three years,
including the time spent on the designs) he finished gloriously the
work, the magnitude of which one must see to comprehend. On All Saints'
Day, 1512, the ceiling was uncovered, and Michael Angelo was hailed,
little though he cared for such clamorous hailing, as a painter indeed.
For this piece of work Michael Angelo received 3000 crowns.

Pope Julius died, and was succeeded by Leo X. of the Medician house,
but, in spite of early associations as well as of mother country,
Michael Angelo was no more acceptable to the Pope--a brilliantly
polished, easy-tempered man of the world, who filled the chair of St
Peter's, than Lionardo had been. Leo X, greatly preferred Raphael, to
whom all manner of pleasantness as well as of courteous deference was
natural, to the two others. At the same time, Leo employed Michael
Angelo, though it was more as an architect than as a painter, and rather
at Florence than at Rome. At Florence Michael Angelo executed for Pope
Clement VII., another Medici, the mortuary chapel of San Lorenzo, with
its six great statues, those of the cousins Lorenzo de Medici and
Giuliano de Medici, the first called by the Florentines 'Il Pensiero,'
or 'Pensive Thought,' with the four colossal recumbent figures named
respectively the Night, the Morning, the Dawn, and the Twilight.

In 1537 Michael Angelo was employed by his fellow citizens to fortify
his native city against the return of his old patrons the Medici, and
the city held out for nine months.

Pope Paul III., an old man when elected to the popedom, but bent on
signalizing his pontificate with as splendid works of art as those
which had rendered the reigns of his predecessors illustrious, summoned
another man, grown elderly, Michael Angelo, upwards of sixty years,
reluct