e of this exchange of
thoughts. It was a period at which his old love of versifying revived
with singular activity. Other friends, like Tommaso Cavalieri, Luigi
del Riccio, and afterwards Vasari, enticed his Muse to frequent
utterance. Those he wrote for the Marchioness were distributed in
manuscript among his private friends, and found their way into the
first edition of his collected poems. But it is a mistake to suppose
that she was the sole or even the chief source of his poetical
inspiration.

We shall see that it was his custom to mark his feeling for particular
friends by gifts of drawings as well as of poems. He did this notably
in the case of both Vittoria Colonna and Tommaso dei Cavalieri. For
the latter he designed subjects from Greek mythology; for the former,
episodes in the Passion of our Lord. "At the request of this lady,"
says Condivi, "he made a naked Christ, at the moment when, taken from
the cross, our Lord would have fallen like an abandoned corpse at the
feet of his most holy Mother, if two angels did not support him in
their arms. She sits below the cross with a face full of tears and
sorrow, lifting both her widespread arms to heaven, while on the stem
of the tree above is written this legend, 'Non vi si pensa quanto
sangue costa.' The cross is of the same kind as that which was carried
in procession by the White Friars at the time of the plague of 1348,
and afterwards deposited in the Church of S. Croce at Florence. He
also made, for love of her, the design of a Jesus Christ upon the
cross, not with the aspect of one dead, as is the common wont, but in
a divine attitude, with face raised to the Father, seeming to exclaim,
'Eli! Eli!' In this drawing the body does not appear to fall, like an
abandoned corpse, but as though in life to writhe and quiver with the
agony it feels."

Of these two designs we have several more or less satisfactory
mementoes. The Pieta was engraved by Giulio Bonasoni and Tudius
Bononiensis (date 1546), exactly as Condivi describes it. The
Crucifixion survives in a great number of pencil-drawings, together
with one or two pictures painted by men like Venusti, and many early
engravings of the drawings. One sketch in the Taylor Museum at Oxford
is generally supposed to represent the original designed for Vittoria.

II

What remains of the correspondence between Michelangelo and the
Marchioness opens with a letter referring to their interchange of
sonnets and drawings