Page:The Life of Michael Angelo.djvu/126

 him! It is not without reason that he was to devote the whole of the end of his life to the work of raising a superhuman monument to the Apostle Peter. More than once, like him, must he have wept on hearing the crowing of the cock. Forced into lying, reduced to flattering a Valori and to celebrating a Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, he was consumed with sorrow and shame. He threw himself into his work, put into it all his useless rage. He did not carve the Medici, but statues representing his despair. When the lack of resemblance in his portraits of Julian and Lorenzo de' Medici was pointed out to him, he superbly replied, "Who will see it ten centuries hence?" One of them he called "Action"; the other, "Thought"; and the statues of the pedestal, which formed a commentary—"Day" and "Night," "Dawn" and "Twilight"—express all the exhausting suffering of life and his disdain of all things. These immortal symbols of human sorrow were finished in