Before long I shall
know what I have to do and will write to you. Tell Lodovico about
it, and be of good cheer. And if it should be that I have to do it
all again, and that I am not able to return to you, I will find
means somehow to do what I have promised in the best way I can.
"The first day of July.
"MICHAEL ANGELO, in Bologna."(96)
He gives further details in his next letter:--
"BUONARROTO,--Understand how that we have cast my figure. I have
not had much luck in it; for Master Bernardino, either by
ignorance or misfortune, did not sufficiently melt the bronze. How
it happened would be long to tell; it is enough that my figure has
come out up to the girdle; the rest of the stuff, that is to say
the metal, remained in the furnace; it was not melted; so that to
get it out I shall have the furnace taken to pieces, and that I am
doing now, and I will have it remade again this week. Next week I
will recast the upper part and finish filling the mould, and I
believe that this bad business will go very well, but not without
the greatest devotion, labour, and expense. I would have believed
that Master Bernardino could have cast it without fire, so much
faith had I in him; all the same, it is not that he is not a good
master and that he did not work with a will. But he who fails,
fails. And he has failed enough to my loss and his own, for he
blames himself so much that he cannot lift his eyes in Bologna.
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