rt when I left Rome, that when I return thither
I may find you with His image renewed and enlivened by true faith in
your soul, in like measure as you have painted it with perfect art in my
Samaritan.[52] Believe me to remain always yours and your Urbino's."

[Illustration: SKETCH FOR THE TOMB OF JULIUS II

Drawing. Uffizi, Florence.]

In this way she merely made use of her powers to soothe her friend's
spirit and to stimulate him to work. Most of all she relit that light of
faith which had never ceased to burn in his soul, although enveloped in
a night of doubt and despair. Besides "The Samaritan Woman at the Well,"
which is spoken of in the letter from Vittoria, Michelangelo made for
her a drawing of a descent from the cross with these words of Dante,
"Non vi si pensa, quaneo sangue costa," and a tragic crucifixion in
which Jesus writhes as he implores Heaven. Perhaps the two admirable
drawings of the Resurrection in the Louvre and the British Museum are of
this same period.

Vittoria, in sending him, after 1539, her Sonetti Spirituali, also
opened before his poetical genius another path to immortality.

Ever since his childhood he had made verses from an impelling need of
expression. He covered his drawings, his letters and loose sheets of
paper with thoughts in verse which he took up again and again, corrected
and worked over ceaselessly. We have only a very few of these poems of
his youth, for he burned many of them in 1518 with some drawings. He did
not think them of value until he met the banker Luigi del Riccio and
Donato Giannotti, who advised him to publish a collection of them.
Donato took the matter up seriously about 1545. Michelangelo made a
selection from his poems and his friends recopied them. But the death of
Riccio in 1546 and perhaps also that of Vittoria in 1547 distracted him
from this thought of worldly fame, and the poems remained unpublished
until his death. Nevertheless they were passed from hand to hand and the
most famous composers of the time, G. Archadelt, Bartolommeo
Tromboncino, Costanzo Festa, Consilium--Italians, Frenchmen and
Flemings--set his madrigals to music. Cultured people admired them, and
Varchi, reading and commenting on one of these sonnets in 1546 before
the Academy of Florence, declared that it had the clarity of the
classic and the richness of the thought of Dante.

Michelangelo was in fact nourished on Dante. "No one understood him
better or knew his works more perf