The sonnet form cramped him, and characteristically he loved that form because of its difficulty. He always delighted in doing violence to his genius and in making himself suffer. His poetry has often been compared to his sculpture. We can almost see him, as in Mariette's account,[57] making the chips of marble fly under his chisel or tearing from the block of his thought the idea that is haunting him, leaving it scarcely freed from the matrix. Frey, in his admirable edition, which is the only exact one of the "Rime" of Michelangelo, reveals the heroic fury with which he composed. He strikes only the main chord on his instrument, nothing more--no development, no variations. His dominant emotion once expressed, there is nothing more to say, the idea is exhausted. Most of his poems have remained in the condition of blocked-out torsos. The most beautiful of these verses were written under the inspiration of Vittoria Colonna and the religious ideas which she revived in him. Separated from each other, they exchanged sonnets; she sent him forty from Viterbo[58] and he answered her in verse.[59] In 1544 Vittoria returned to Rome to live in the cloister of S. Anna and remained there until her death on February 25, 1547. Her death prostrated Michelangelo. "He remained for a long time stupefied and out of his senses," says Condivi. But the faith which she had given back to him never again left him. The death of his friend only deepened it, and the two strange and powerful sonnets which celebrate that death[60] are a hymn of triumphant faith and love. When Michelangelo finally left Florence in 1534 and went to settle in Rome he expected to be at last free and able to discharge his debt to the memory of Julius II. But no sooner was the new pope elected than he hastened to attach Michelangelo to himself. He was Paulo III Farnese, "a choleric man, ambitious, daring, full of intelligence and cunning, ostentatious, one of the last great popes of the Renaissance and the one who perhaps did the most to beautify Rome, the great builder among the popes of the sixteenth century."[61] He summoned Michelangelo, overwhelmed him with promises, and asked him to work for him. Michelangelo wanted to decline, alleging as excuse his old contracts with the heirs of Julius II, but Paul III was furious and declared that he would tear up all those contracts and that Michelangelo should work for him in spite of everything. Michelangelo thought of taking flight to Urbino or to Genoa to his friend, the bishop of Almeria, but he gave in as usual, too weak to resist. The pope, who came with ten of his cardinals to see the statues already completed for the monument of Julius II, went into ecstasies over them, especially over the Moses, of which the Cardinal of Mantua said that "that figure alone would be enough to honour the memory of Pope Julius," and he was even more determined than before to reserve Michelangelo exclusively for his own plans.