In the Church of San Petronio are the bones of St. Domenico in a marble coffin; on the sarcophagus two kneeling figures were to be placed by Nicolo Pisano, a contemporary of Cimabue. One was unfinished in its drapery, and the other, a kneeling angel holding a candelabrum, was not even begun. At Aldovrandi's request Michael Angelo completed this work. So exasperated were the artists of Bologna at his skill that he felt obliged to leave their city, and return to Florence. What a pitiful exhibition of human weakness! Meantime Piero had fled from Florence. Charles VIII. of France had made a triumphal entrance into the city, and Savonarola had become lawgiver. "Jesus Christ is the King of Florence," was written over the gates of the Palazzo Vecchio, hymns were sung in the streets instead of ballads, the sacrament was received daily, and worldly books, even Petrarch and Virgil, and sensuous works of art, were burned on a huge pile. "Even Fra Bartolomeo was so carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment as to bring his life-academy studies to be consumed on this pyre, forgetful that, in the absence of such studies, he could never have risen above low mediocrity. Lorenzo di Credi, another and devoted follower of Savonarola, did the same." Michael Angelo, though an ardent admirer of Savonarola, and an attendant upon his preaching, seems not to have lost his good judgment, or to have considered the making of a sleeping Cupid a sin. When the beautiful work was completed, at the suggestion of a friend, it was buried in the ground for a season, to give it the appearance of an antique, and then sold to Cardinal San Giorgio for two hundred ducats, though Michael Angelo received but thirty as his share. Soon after, the cardinal ascertained how he had been imposed upon, and invited the artist to Rome, with the hope that the hundred and seventy ducats could be obtained from the dishonest agent who effected the sale. Vasari states that many persons believed that the agent, and not Michael Angelo, buried the statue for gain, which seems probable from all we know of the artist's upright character. Michael Angelo went to the Eternal City in June, 1496. He was still young, only twenty-one. "The idea," says Hermann Grimm, in his scholarly life of the artist, "that the young Michael Angelo, full of the bustle of the fanatically excited Florence, was led by his fate to Rome, and trod for the first time that soil where the most corrupt doings were, nevertheless, lost sight of in the calm grandeur of the past, has something in it that awakens thought. It was the first step in his actual life. He had before been led hither and thither by men and by his own indistinct views; now, thrown upon his own resources, he takes a new start for his future, and what he now produces begins the series of his masterly works."