Now, he was in Rome, “art-adviser” to the Terrible Pontiff, eating his own heart in inactivity, burning and yearning to work with his own hands, with all the passionate excruciating torture suffered by every artist who may not put his talent “out to the exchangers.” It was the lust of creation in Michelangelo that made him terrible to his fellow men. His incivilities to his colleagues are proverbial. “Goffo nell’ arte” he flung with contemptuous scorn to Messer Pietro di Cristoforo Vanucci of città della Pieve (detto Perugino) who had a picture-shop at Florence, and bought estates with the proceeds of his smooth and stony saints and seraphs, stencilled by his pupils on the canvases, and touched by himself in his workshop or picture-factory at Perugia, at the very time when Oddi and Baglioni each were tearing the other’s throats to tatters outside his door. Then in 1508 the Lord Julius P.P. II ordered Messer Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Xystine Chapel. The gods on high Olympos never allow a man to do the thing that he wants to do: they are jealous lest a man should create a god. Messer Michelangelo wanted to practise sculpture; wherefore he was told to paint a ceiling. “I’m not a painter!” (Nè io pittore!) he roared to the Terrible Pontiff, who fulminated and thundered in reply. They both were terrible men; and they unrestrainedly spoke with perfect frankness as between man and man, using no set form whatever. The Terrible Pontiff, like all clerical patrons, was an infernal nuisance to the Terrible Painter, who well-nigh killed himself by years of ceaseless toil, lying on his back upon a scaffold in the filthy air that hangs about a ceiling. He would have no assistant save a boy or two. He lived, and ate, and slept on the scene of his labour. Many times the Terrible Pontiff came to see what was being done; and every time the Terrible Painter instructed Him in the art and mystery of anathema, and drove Him away. At last the Lord Julius P.P. II threatened to have Messer Michelangelo flung down, and the scaffold pulled about his ears: but this was when the work was done. The Terrible Painter had the scaffold removed, and invited his patron to view the sumptuous ceiling. The Terrible Pontiff came; and saw; and suggested that the scaffold should be reerected so that the work might be touched up with—ultramarine and gold-leaf! * * * * *