studio, until he was brought to Florence--a dead old man, concealed in a
bale of merchandise, because the authorities refused permission to his
friends to take his body from Rome--and was buried at midnight in Santa
Croce.

They tried to imagine his life during the four years which he spent in
the Medici Palace, now Palazzo Riccardi, under the patronage of Lorenzo
the Magnificent, while he was studying with the same tremendous energy
that marked all his life, going almost daily to the Brancacci Chapel to
learn from Masaccio's frescoes, and plunging into the subject of anatomy
more like a devotee than a student.

They learned of his visit to Rome, where, before he was twenty-five
years old, he sculptured the grand _Pietá_, or _Dead Christ_, which is
still in St. Peter's; and of his return to Florence, where he foresaw
his _David_ in the shapeless block of marble, and gained permission of
the commissioners to hew it out,--the David which stood so long under
the shadow of old gray Palazzo Vecchio, but is now in the Academy.

Then came the beginnings of his painting; and they saw the _Holy Family_
of the Uffizi Gallery--his only finished easel picture--which possesses
more of the qualities of sculpture than painting; and read about his
competition with Leonardo da Vinci when he prepared the famous _Cartoon
of Pisa_, now known to the world only by fragmentary copies.

Then Pope Julius II. summoned him back to Rome to begin work on that
vast monument conceived for the commemoration of his own greatness, and
destined never to be finished; and afterward gave him the commission to
paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican.