"For the business of the shop I will send you a hundred ducats
next Saturday. With this, if you see that they are diligent and do
well, give it to them and make me their creditor, as I was to
Buonarroto when he went away. If they are not diligent, and do
badly, place it to my account at Santa Maria Nuova. It is not yet
time to buy.
"Your MICHAEL ANGELO, in Rome.
"If you are speaking to the father of the boy, put the matter
nicely, mannerly; that he is a good lad, but too genteel, and that
he is not fit for my work, and that he must send for him."(111)
[Image #22]
ATHLETE
SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME
(_By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence_)
The more gentle tone of the postscript is very characteristic. Outwardly
he would be rough, consumed with anger and indignation; but inwardly his
nature was kindly to a degree to those he had about him.
Condivi tells us of the delay in the works in the Sistine due to the mould
on the surface of the fresco, and of the haste of Julius. The progress was
fast enough, one would have thought, even for that exacting Pontiff; for
although the whole work consists, on counting heads, of some three hundred
and ninety-four figures, the majority ten feet high; the prophets and
sibyls, twelve in number, would be eighteen feet high if they stood up;
yet by the following letters to his brother Buonarroto, of October 1509,
we know he had finished the first half, consisting probably of some two
hundred figures, even then; or assuming that he began to paint when the
assistants were dismissed in January 1509, he worked at the rate of about
a figure a day.
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