at will
follow. I should have come to you immediately on the receipt of
your last, but if I left without permission I doubt the Pope would
be angry, and I should lose all that I ought to have.
Nevertheless, let me know immediately if Buonarroto should still
be very bad, because if you think I ought to come I will ride post
and be with you in two days, for men are worth more than money.
Let me know at once, for I am very anxious.

"On the 7th day of September.

"Your MICHAEL ANGELO, Sculptor, in Rome."(117)

The following note tells of the end of the work:

"I have finished the Chapel which I painted. The Pope is very well
satisfied, but other things do not happen as I wished. Lay blame on the
times, which are unfavourable to art." It is a note by Michael Angelo in
the Buonarroto manuscripts of the British Museum, but undated. It is
probably of October 1512, and marks the close of this period of enormous
work. The decoration of the Sistine Chapel now consisted, firstly, on the
flat of the vault, of Michael Angelo's history of the Creation and the
Fall of Man, of the Punishment of the Flood, and the Second Entry of Sin
into the World; secondly, on the pendentives, of the Prophets and Sibyls
proclaiming the coming of a Redeemer; and thirdly, of the Ancestors of
Christ, filling the arches of the windows and the arches on the two end
walls. Those on the altar wall are now covered by angels bearing the
instruments of the Passion of Christ, parts of the great fresco of the
Last Judgment, finished by Michael Angelo thirty years afterwards. At
Oxford there are two drawings after these two destroyed frescoes of the
Ancestors of Christ series. Fourthly, at the four corners the four great
Deliverances of the Chosen People, emblems of the Redemption; fifthly,
below, between the windows, a row of the figures of the Popes by Sandro
Botticelli and others; these are still in existence, except the three that
were on the wall of the high altar, now occupied by the Last Judgment.
They were the earliest of the Popes, St. Peter probably in the centre.
Lastly, below again, the great series of frescoes of the History of Christ
and the History of Moses by Sandro Botticelli, Domenico del Ghirlandaio,
Cosimo Rosselli, Pietro Perugino, Bernardino Pintoricchio, Luca
Signorelli, and Bartolomeo della Gatta. This splendid series forms a
worthy predella to the epic work of Michael Angelo abov