sentiment. "True painting," he said, "never will make any one
shed a tear."[12]

It should contain no expression of religion or worship, for "good
painting is religious and devout in itself. Among the wise nothing more
elevates the soul or better raises it to adoration than the difficulty
of attaining the perfection which approaches God and unites itself to
Him."[13] He believed himself to be more religious in creating
beautiful, harmonious human bodies than in searching for a psychological
or moral expression intended "for women, especially for the old or the
very young, or for monks, nuns and those who are deaf to true
harmony."[14] The Pieta of St. Peter's, undertaken the year of
Savonarola's death, has a more Christian character than the earlier
works of Michelangelo, but this Christianity is still far from
conforming to the expressive and pathetic ideal of the artists of the
fifteenth century, or from the tragic expression and agony of suffering
of the virgins of Donatello, Signorelli or Mantegna. Very different
indeed is the noble harmony of this group and the calm beauty of the
young Virgin on whose knees rests the supple body of Christ relaxed like
that of a sleeping child. Even though Michelangelo explained the eternal
youth of the Virgin[15] by an idea of chivalric mysticism it is
evident that at that time the desire for beauty was as strong in his
heart as any regard for faith and that there was a certain relationship
between these beautiful Gods of Calvary and those of Olympus whose charm
had intoxicated him.

[Illustration: PIETA

St. Peter's, Rome (1498-1500).]

Michelangelo spent two years on the Pieta.[16] In the spring of 1501 he
returned to Florence and there met Cardinal Piccolomini, with whom he
signed a contract to deliver in three years' time, for the sum of five
hundred ducats, fifteen figures of apostles and saints for the
Piccolomini altar in the Cathedral of Sienna. This was the first of
those overpowering commissions which Michelangelo never hesitated to
undertake in the first intoxication of his imagination without any just
estimate of his powers and which weighed on him all his life, like
remorse. In 1504 he had delivered only four of the figures and sixty
years later in 1561 he was still tormented by the thought of this
unfulfilled contract.

Another undertaking, more tempting to him by its very difficulty, took
entire possession of him a few months after he had made the agreement
w