ith marble may be
taken for granted, considering the high finish which has been given to
every part of this description of work in the chapel. Treated as I
have suggested, the statue of the Madonna, with the patron saints of
the House of Medici, overshadowed by a picture of Christ's sacrifice,
would have confronted the mystery of the Mass during every celebration
at the altar. There are many designs for the Crucifixion, made by
Michelangelo in later life, so lofty as almost to suggest a group of
figures in the foreground, cutting the middle distance.

At the close of Michelangelo's life the sacristy was still unfinished.
It contained the objects I have described--the marble panelling, the
altar with its candelabra, the statues of the Dukes and their
attendant figures, the Madonna and two Medicean patron saints--in
fact, all that we find there now, with the addition of Giovanni da
Udine's frescoes in the cupola, the relics of which have since been
buried under cold Florentine whitewash.

All the views I have advanced in the foregoing paragraphs as to the
point at which Michelangelo abandoned this chapel, and his probable
designs for its completion, are in the last resort based upon an
important document penned at the instance of the Duke of Florence by
Vasari to Buonarroti, not long before the old man's death in Rome.
This epistle has so weighty a bearing upon the matter in hand that I
shall here translate it. Careful study of its fluent periods will
convince an unprejudiced mind that the sacristy, as we now see it, is
even less representative of its maker's design than it was when Vasari
wrote. The frescoes of Giovanni da Udine are gone. It will also show
that the original project involved a wealth of figurative decoration,
statuary, painting, stucco, which never arrived at realisation.

VII

Vasari, writing in the spring of 1562, informs Michelangelo concerning
the Academy of Design founded by Duke Cosimo de' Medici, and of the
Duke's earnest desire that he should return to Florence in order that
the sacristy at S. Lorenzo may be finished. "Your reasons for not
coming are accepted as sufficient. He is therefore considering
--forasmuch as the place is being used now for religious services by day
and night, according to the intention of Pope Clement--he is
considering, I say, a plan for erecting the statues which are missing in
the niches above the sepulchres and the tabernacles above the doors. The
Duke then wish