Pierre de Rohan, Marechal de Gie, the favorite of Louis
XII, which in the end was finished by Benedetto da Rovezzano in 1507 and
sent, after the disgrace of Rohan, to the new royal favourite, Florimond
Robertet, Secretary of Finance.

In 1503 he undertook twelve statues for the Cathedral of Florence, but
began only one, a St. Matthew, which was never finished and is now in
the Accademia delle Belle Arti. His vacillating, uncertain genius,
wherein discouragement succeeded to enthusiasm, drove him into planning
works with fierce energy and then almost immediately so diverted his
attention that he could not force himself to finish them.

[Illustration: DAVID

Accademia delle Belle Arti, Florence.]

In 1504 the Florentine Signory brought him into competition with another
great irresolute, Lionardo da Vinci, whose universal intellectual
curiosity was, no less than the temperament of Michelangelo, an eternal
obstacle to the achievement of his great undertakings. The two men seem
to have met about 1495. They could not have understood each other very
well, for they both stood alone, each in his own way. Lionardo was now
fifty-two years old. When he was thirty he had left Florence, where the
bitterness of the political and religious passions was unbearable to his
delicate and slightly timid nature and to his serene and sceptical
intelligence which was interested in everything but refused to take
sides. Driven back to Florence by the death or ruin of his protectors,
the Duke of Milan and Caesar Borgia, he came into contact there from the
very first with Michelangelo entirely absorbed in his own faith and
passions, however changing they might be, and who, while he hated the
enemies of his party and of his faith, hated still more those who had
neither party nor faith. Brutally and publicly, on many occasions,
Michelangelo made Lionardo feel his aversion for him.

When the Gonfalonier Soderini put the two in direct competition in a
common work, the decoration of the Council Hall in the Palace of the
Signory, the rivalry was intense. In May, 1504, Lionardo began the
cartoon of the Battle of Anghiari. In August, 1504, Michelangelo
received the order for the cartoon for the Battle of Cascine. Florence
was divided into two camps keenly enthusiastic for one or the other of
the rivals. Time has made them equal, for both pictures have
disappeared. Michelangelo's cartoon, finished in March, 1505, was
apparently destroyed about 1512, du