ality of Florence assigned him the Sala del
Papa at S. Maria Novella before February 1504, and were preparing the
necessary furniture for the construction of his Cartoon. It seems that
he was hard at work upon the 1st of April, receiving fifteen golden
florins a month for his labour. The subject which he chose to treat
was the battle of Anghiari in 1440, when the Florentine mercenaries
entirely routed the troops of Filippo Maria Visconti, led by Niccolo
Piccinino, one of the greatest generals of his age. In August 1504
Soderini commissioned Michelangelo to prepare Cartoons for the
opposite wall of the great Sala, and assigned to him a workshop in the
Hospital of the Dyers at S. Onofrio. A minute of expenditure, under
date October 31, 1504, shows that the paper for the Cartoon had been
already provided; and Michelangelo continued to work upon it until his
call to Rome at the beginning of 1505. Lionardo's battle-piece
consisted of two groups on horseback engaged in a fierce struggle for
a standard. Michelangelo determined to select a subject which should
enable him to display all his power as the supreme draughtsman of the
nude. He chose an episode from the war with Pisa, when, on the 28th of
July 1364, a band of 400 Florentine soldiers were surprised bathing by
Sir John Hawkwood and his English riders. It goes by the name of the
Battle of Pisa, though the event really took place at Cascina on the
Arno, some six miles above that city.

We have every reason to regard the composition of this Cartoon as the
central point in Michelangelo's life as an artist. It was the
watershed, so to speak, which divided his earlier from his later
manner; and if we attach any value to the critical judgment of his
enthusiastic admirer, Cellini, even the roof of the Sistine fell short
of its perfection. Important, however, as it certainly is in the
history of his development, I must defer speaking of it in detail
until the end of the next chapter. For some reason or other, unknown
to us, he left his work unfinished early in 1505, and went, at the
Pope's invitation, to Rome. When he returned, in the ensuing year, to
Florence, he resumed and completed the design. Some notion of its size
may be derived from what we know about the material supplied for
Lionardo's Cartoon. This, say Crowe and Cavalcaselle, "was made up of
one ream and twenty-nine quires, or about 288 square feet of royal
folio paper, the mere pasting of which necessitated a consum