and Pope Leo X, but also to build a library for the
Laurentian collection, which Michelangelo must design. A little later
he had decided that he would prefer to lie in the choir of the church,
and Leo X with him, and instead therefore of tombs Michelangelo might
merely make a colossal statue of him to stand in the piazza before the
church. The sculptor's temper had not been improved by his many years'
experience of papal caprice, and he replied to this suggestion with
a letter unique even in the annals of infuriated artists. Let the
statue be made, of course, he said, but let it be useful as well as
ornamental: the lower portion to be also a barber's shop, and the
head, since it would be empty, a greengrocer's. The Pope allowed
himself to be rebuked, and abandoned the statue, writing a mild and
even pathetic reply.

Until 1527 Michelangelo worked away at the building and the tombs,
always secretly, behind impenetrable barriers; and then came the
troubles which led to the siege of Florence, following upon the
banishment of Alessandro, Duke of Urbino, natural son of the very
Lorenzo whom the sculptor was to dignify for all time. By the Emperor
Charles V and Pope Clement VII the city was attacked, and Michelangelo
was called away from Clement's sacristy to fortify Florence against
Clement's soldiers. Part of his ramparts at S. Miniato still remain,
and he strengthened all the gates; but, feeling himself slighted and
hating the whole affair, he suddenly disappeared. One story is that he
hid in the church tower of S. Niccolo, below what is now the Piazzale
dedicated to his memory. Wherever he was, he was proclaimed an outlaw,
and then, on Florence finding that she could not do without him,
was pardoned, and so returned, the city meanwhile having surrendered
and the Medici again being restored to power.

The Pope showed either fine magnanimity or compounded with facts
in the interest of the sacristy; for he encouraged Michelangelo to
proceed, and the pacific work was taken up once more after the martial
interregnum, and in a desultory way he was busy at it, always secretly
and moodily, until 1533, when he tired completely and never touched
it again. A year later Clement VII died, having seen only drawings
of the tombs, if those.

But though left unfinished, the sacristy is wholly satisfying--more
indeed than satisfying, conquering. Whatever help Michelangelo may
have had from his assistants, it is known that the symbolica