till see there a tumultuous force which
struggles in darkness.[77]

During this fifteen years' work the old man had lost all hope of ever
finishing the monument of Julius II, and had with great difficulty
prevented Paul III from taking some of the statues to serve as ornaments
of the Pauline Chapel. He had had to sign, on August 20, 1542, a fifth
and last contract with the heirs of Julius II. By this agreement he
relinquished for the time being three statues, which must have been the
Moses and the two Slaves.[78] Then he decided that the Slaves were not
any longer fitted to the tomb and he began two other figures, Active
Life and Contemplative Life.[79]

In addition, Michelangelo agreed to give fourteen hundred crowns[80] to
his pupil Urbino and to Raffaello da Montelupo for finishing the
monument, after which he was to be free from all obligation forever.

But he had not reached the end of his troubles, for the heirs of Julius
II continued persecuting the poor man with insulting demands for money
which they pretended to have previously disbursed to him. Michelangelo
went almost mad, as he had done in the time of Clement VII over the
Medici Chapel, and it was in vain that Paul III commanded him not to
think about it, but to give himself up entirely to his painting of the
Pauline Chapel.

He answered, "You paint with your head and not with your hands. Who does
not think for himself dishonours himself. That is why I can do nothing
good so long as I have these preoccupations. I have been chained to this
trouble all my life," he continued, bitterly, "I have lost my youth over
it; I have been ruined by my too great conscientiousness. It is my fate;
I see many people who live tranquilly on an income of two or three
thousand crowns and I have only succeeded after a terrible struggle in
being poor."[81]

To satisfy his creditors he finished with his own hands the statues of
Active Life and Contemplative Life,[82] although he was not obliged to
do so.

At last the monument of Julius II was finished and shown in the Church
of S. Pietro in Vinculi in February, 1545. What was left of the
beautiful original plan? Only the Moses which had become the central
figure after having been merely one of the details. Would the complete
work have been a prodigy analogous for sculpture to what the Sistine
Chapel is for painting? Certainly no prophet of the Sistine Chapel
attains to the sovereign perfection of the Moses.

[Illustration: