Page:The Life of Michael Angelo.djvu/67

 run counter to each other. Their brains were full of gigantic projects. Julius II. wished to build for himself a mausoleum worthy of Ancient Rome. Michael Angclo seized upon this proud and imperial idea with passionate enthusiasm, and conceived a Babylonian project—a very mountain of architecture with more than forty statues of colossal dimensions. The Pope, equally enthusiastic, despatched him to Carrara to obtain all the necessary marble. Michael Angelo remained in the mountains more than eight months. He was a prey to superhuman excitement. "One day, whilst riding through the country on horseback, he saw a mountain which dominated the coast, and was seized with a desire to carve it in its entirety, to transform it into a Colossus visible to navigators from afar . . . He would have done it had he had the time and been permitted."

In December 1505 he returned to Rome, where the blocks of marble which he had chosen had begun to arrive by sea. They were transported on to the square of St. Peter, behind Santa Caterina, where Michael Angelo lived. "The mass of stone was so great that it excited the astonishment of the people and the joy of the Pope." Michael Angelo set to work. The Pope, in his impatience, came to see him ceaselessly " and conversed with him as familiarly as though he had been his own brother." In order to visit him more conveniently he had a drawbridge, which assured him a secret passage, thrown from a corridor of the Vatican to Michael Angelo's house.

But the Pope's favour lasted only a short time. The character of Julius II. was no less inconstant than that of Michael Angelo. He became interested in the most dissimilar projects one after the other. Another plan — that of the rebuilding of St. Peter's—appeared to him to