In the sentimental rubbish which historians and art critic’s write about the Middle Ages, we are told that mighty cathedrals and temples were produced by the co-operative devotion and reverence of whole communities of worshipers. When you come to investigate the facts, you find that they were produced amid a chaos of wrangling and cheating and lying, exactly as a modern public building, or a battleship, or a fleet of aeroplanes is produced. The chief architect of Pope Julius II was a dissipated and murderous rascal, who was putting rotten walls into the Vatican buildings--walls which have had to be repaired incessantly ever since. He carried on intrigues against Michelangelo, and succeeded in persuading the pope that it was bad luck for anyone to build his own tomb while he was alive. So the pope dropped the project, and Michelangelo was left in debt, having to pay out of his own pocket the costs of transporting the mountain of marble. The sculptor stormed the Vatican and insisted upon being paid, and the pope had him put out by a groom. Next he was required to make a bronze statue of his most holy pope. He protested that he did not know anything about casting bronze, but he worked at it for more than a year, making a wretched failure of it, and ruining his health. Then he was ordered to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He protested that he did not know how to paint ceilings, it was hard and exhausting work; but again the pope insisted, and Michelangelo spent four years at this, painting his colossal and terrifying symbols upside down. Because he took so long at it, the pope was enraged, insisting upon seeing the work and criticizing it, flying into a fury and beating Michelangelo with his staff, then sending a messenger with five hundred ducats to salve his feelings. Julius II died and Leo X came in. Michelangelo had made a new contract with the heirs of the dead pope to complete the tomb, and had started work on thirty-two colossal statues. But the new pope wanted Michelangelo’s fame for himself, and so for ten years the poor sculptor was pulled and hauled between two rival groups. It was the fashion of other sculptors and painters, when thus loaded down with work, to hire a number of assistants and put the job through in a hurry. But Michelangelo suffered from conscientiousness; he thought that nobody else could do his work as he wanted it done, and he sweated and agonized and groaned under the burden of these contracts. More marble was needed, and he was dragged about between the rival owners of marble quarries. The unsuccessful owners intrigued with the boatmen to make it impossible for the marble to be moved; just like a certain teamsters’ strike which I had occasion to investigate in Chicago some twenty years ago--the riots and mobbings and showers of brick-bats and broken heads and bullet-riddled bodies were caused by a great mail-order house having paid for a strike against a rival mail-order house!