power identifies them with Michael Angelo, may have belonged to his original plan. About the beginning of 1545, forty years after it had been undertaken, the work was placed in the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli, of which Julius had been Cardinal-presbyter. Though meant as his tomb, it is but his monument; for the bones of that imperious high priest have found a fitter resting-place in the grandest of Christian fanes, his own creation, and best memorial. Few works of art have occasioned greater variety of opinion. In his Lectures, Fuseli has exposed several of his defects, and the impression it most frequently leaves upon the spectator is thus aptly expressed by him in an Italian letter to the translator of Webb on the Beautiful:-- "In the Moses, Michael Angelo has sacrificed beauty to anatomical science, and to his favourite passion for the terrible and the gigantic. If it be true that he looked at the arm of the famous Ludovisi satyr, he probably, also, studied the head, in order to transfer its character to the Moses, since both of them resemble that of an old he-goat. There is, notwithstanding, in the figure a quality of monstrous grandeur which cannot be denied to Buonarroti, and which, like a thunder-storm, presaged the bright days of Raffaele." This monument must ever be regarded as but the epitome of a grand design, curtailed without scale or measurement, deformed by colossal portions from the original in combination with dwarfish details of its pigmy substitute, marred by incomplete allegories, and eked out by supposititious figures. Yet few will leave the spot without another glance at the tremendous Moses, nor will any connoisseur avert his gaze until the awful majesty of that one statue has eclipsed the petty incongruities of its location. It is among those rare creations of man's mind which, rising above the standard of human forms and human sympathies, demand a loftier test. The pervading sentiment alone challenges our intellectual regard, and bespeaks our verdict; yet with playful prodigality, the artist has lavished an ivory finish upon its details, without detracting from the sublime character of the irate lawgiver.[226] [Footnote 226: A favourite workman of Buonarroti, often met with under the patronymic Urbino, was Francesco Amadori di Colonello, of Castel Durante, who lived with him from 1530 to 1536. See GUALANDI, _Nuovo Raccolta di Lettere sulla Pittura_, I., 48-52.] * * * * *