e, flexible character pleased him, and
who, thanks to his protection, marked every instant of his short life by
some _chef d'oeuvre._ It must not be forgotten that it was by the most
extravagant largesses, by making a traffic of everything, that he
encouraged the pleiad of artists who shed such glory upon his name. His
obstinacy in employing Michelangelo for so many years, in spite of his
reluctance and entreaties, on a work which his own fickleness and the war
in Lombardy ought to have made him abandon, has, there can be no doubt,
deprived us of some admirable works. But for it Michelangelo would have
finished the tomb of Julius II, and we should now possess a gigantic
monument that would, no doubt, have rivalled the grandest works of
ancient statuary.

A few words of Condivi's show the grief and discouragement which the
capriciousness of Leo, and the inutility of the work the master was
employed on, caused Michelangelo. "On his return to Florence he found
Leo's ardor entirely cooled. He continued a long time weighed down by
grief, unable to do anything, having hitherto, to his great displeasure,
been driven from one project to another." It was, however, about this
period (1520) that Leo ordered the tombs of his brother Giuliano and his
nephew Lorenzo, for the sacristy of the Church of San Lorenzo, which were
not executed till ten years later; also plans for the library for the
reception of the valuable manuscripts collected from Cosmo and Lorenzo
the Magnificent, and which had been dispersed during the troubles of
1494. He was at Florence when the Academy of Santa Maria Novella, of
which he was a member, proposed to have transported from Ravenna to
Florence the ashes of Dante, and addressed the noble supplication to the
Pope which has been preserved by Gore, signed by the most illustrious
names of the time, and among others that of Michelangelo, with this
addition: "I, Michelangelo, sculptor, also beseech your holiness, and
offer myself to execute a suitable monument for the divine poet in some
fitting part of the city." Leo did not receive this project favorably,
and it was abandoned.

The statue "The Christ on the Cross," that had been ordered by Antonio
Matelli, and which is now in the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva,
was, it is probable, executed during Michelangelo's rare visits to Rome
under Leo's pontificate. His discouragement had become such that he had
it finished and put up, at the end of 1521, by a Fl