arble
to cut from it four figures larger than life, of which one was a dead
Christ.[104] He did this to amuse himself and to pass the time, and
because he said that work with a chisel kept him in health. He worked at
night[105] and slept very little, and had made himself a helmet of
cardboard to hold a lighted candle on his head so that with both hands
free he could light what he was doing. Even at that age he cut the
marble with such impetuosity and vigour that it seemed to fly in pieces.
He broke off in one blow great fragments four or five inches thick and
left a line so pure that if he had gone a hair's breadth further he
would have risked ruining the whole. This did happen to many of his
works, which remained merely blocked out like the figures in the Boboli
grotto, or half finished like the Madonna of the Medici chapel, or
destroyed, as all but happened to the admirable Descent from the Cross
in the cathedral at Florence.

"He would break a work in pieces," says Vasari, "either because the
block was hard and full of flaws and sparks shot out from under the
chisel, or because the uncompromising judgment of this man was never
contented with anything that he did, which is easily proved by the fact
that so few of the works of his maturity are complete; the only finished
ones dated from his youth."

The Florentine sculptor Tiberio Calcagni, who was a friend as well as
his assistant at S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, found the debris of a Pieta
one day, and asked why he had destroyed "so admirable a work."
Michelangelo told him that it was partly the fault of his servant
Urbino, who urged him every day to finish it, when he was already
annoyed by a flaw in the marble so that he had lost patience and had
broken it. He would have destroyed it entirely but that his servant
Antonio "had begged for what remained." Tiberio bought the marble from
Antonio for two hundred gold crowns and asked Michelangelo's permission
to finish it for their mutual friend Francesco Bandini. Michelangelo was
entirely willing, and the group was restored by Tiberio, who completed
several parts of it, but Bandini, Michelangelo and Tiberio all died and
it was never finished.[106]

It is all the more moving for that reason. In the half-shadow behind the
high altar in Florence it stirs one with indescribable emotion. Perhaps
no other work of Michelangelo is so human or speaks so directly to the
soul. "From heart to heart," as Beethoven wrote at the end