“Do you not know,” he said, “that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire ever arose? And I tell you, moreover, that such freshness and flower of youth besides being maintained in her by natural causes, it may possibly be that it was ordained by the Divine Power to prove to the world the virginity and perpetual purity of the Mother. It was not necessary in the Son; but rather the contrary; wishing to show that the Son of God took upon himself a true human body, subject to all the ills of man, excepting only sin; he did not allow the divine in him to hold back the human, but let it run its course and obey its laws, as was proved in his appointed time. Do not wonder then, that I have for all these reasons, made the most Holy Virgin, Mother of God, a great deal younger in comparison with her Son than she is usually represented. To the Son I have allotted his full age.” The “Pieta” and the “David” are the typical works of Angelo’s first period—that in which the influences of humanism were paramount. But it is in the sculptures of his second period that we can detect the workings of the deep philosophical poetry which inspired the most characteristic of his works—the tomb of Julius II. and the monuments in the Medici chapel at Florence. Neither was ever finished. The Medici monuments are the more complete, for the majesty of the sculptor’s first conception for the tomb of Julius II. can now be only guessed from a few rough sketches, half a dozen measurements and the well-known “Moses.” Yet it occupies a unique place in the history of Italian art as the foremost work by an Italian sculptor which arose directly out of the ambition of the Church to make the Pope’s temporal authority equal his spiritual.