him! It is not without reason that he was to devote the whole of the end of his life to the work of raising a superhuman monument to the Apostle Peter. More than once, like him, must he have wept on hearing the crowing of the cock.
Forced into lying, reduced to flattering a Valori and to celebrating a Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, he was consumed with sorrow and shame. He threw himself into his work, put into it all his useless rage.[1] He did not carve the Medici, but statues representing his despair. When the lack of resemblance in his portraits of Julian and Lorenzo de' Medici was pointed out to him, he superbly replied, "Who will see it ten centuries hence?" One of them he called "Action"; the other, "Thought"; and the statues of the pedestal, which formed a commentary—"Day" and "Night," "Dawn" and "Twilight"—express all the exhausting suffering of life and his disdain of all things. These immortal symbols of human sorrow were finished in
- ↑ During these same years, the darkest of his life, Michael Angelo, through a savage reaction of his nature against the Christian pessimism which stifled him, executed some works noteworthy for their audacious paganism, such as his "Leda caressed by the Swan" (1529–1530), which, painted for the Duke of Ferrara, then given by Michael Angelo to his pupil Antonio Mini, was taken by the latter to France, where it was destroyed, it is said, about 1643, by Sublet des Noyers, owing to its lasciviousness. A little later Michael Angelo painted for Bartolommeo Bettini a cartoon of "Venus caressed by Cupid," from which Pontormo painted a picture, which is in the Uffizi. Other drawings, grandiose and severe in their indecency, probably belong to the same period. Charles Blanc describes one of them, "in which we see the transports of joy of a ravished woman, who struggles lustily against her stronger ravisher, but not without expressing an involuntary feeling of happiness and pride."
