eeded him and went
into exile; Giuliano, who returned; Lucrezia, who married Giacomo
Salviati, and was grandmother of Cosimo I; Contessina, who married
Piero Ridolfi; Maddalena, who married Francesco Cibo; and Maria, whom
Michelangelo is said to have loved. Lorenzo's successor, Piero, did not
long retain the power his father had left him; he was vain and
impetuous, and, trying to rule without the Signoria, placed Pisa and
Livorno in the hands of Charles VIII of France, who was on his carnival
way to Naples. Savonarola chased him out, and sacked the treasures of
his house. He died in exile. It was his brother Giuliano who returned,
Savonarola being executed in 1512. Giuliano was a better ruler than his
brother, but he behaved like a despot till his brother Giovanni became
Pope, when he resigned the government of Florence to his nephew Lorenzo,
the son of Piero, and while he became Gonfaloniere of Rome and
Archbishop, Lorenzo became Duke of Urbino and father of Catherine de'
Medici of France. It is this Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici that
Michelangelo has immortalised with an everlasting gesture of sorrow and
contempt. On the right is the tomb of Giuliano, and over it he sits for
ever as a general of the Church; on the left is Lorenzo's dust, coffered
in imperishable marble, over which he sits plotting for ever. The
statues that Michelangelo has carved there have been called Night and
Day, Twilight and Dawn; but indeed these names, as I have said, are far
too definite for them: they are just a gesture of despair, of despair of
a world which has come to nothing. They are in no real sense of the word
political, but rather an expression, half realised after all, of some
immense sadness, some terrible regret, which has fallen upon the soul of
one who had believed in righteousness and freedom, and had found himself
deceived. It is not the house of Medici that there sees its own image of
despair, but rather Florence, which had been content that such things
should be. Some obscure and secret sorrow has for a moment overwhelmed
the soul of the great poet in thinking of Florence, of the world, of the
hearts of men, and as though trying to explain to himself his own
melancholy and indignation, he has carved these statues, to which men
have given the names of the most tremendous and the most sweet of
natural things--Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn; and even as in the
Sistine Chapel Michelangelo has thought only of Life,--of the Creat