In August, 1504, Michelangelo was commissioned by his friend and protector, Piero Soderini, Gonfaloniere of the Republic, to decorate a wall in the Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo Vecchio, a most flattering compliment to the young artist, as Leonardo da Vinci, then at the height of his fame, was already engaged in preparing cartoons for the opposite wall. Leonardo's designs represented the famous _Fight for the Standard_, an episode of the battle of Anghiari, fought in 1440, when the Florentines defeated Niccolò Piccinino. Michelangelo selected for his subject an episode in the war with Pisa, which gave him an opportunity to display his wonderful draughtsmanship and his profound knowledge of the human frame. Benvenuto Cellini, who copied the cartoon in 1513, just before its mysterious disappearance, describes it as follows: "Michelangelo portrayed a number of foot soldiers who, the season being summer, had gone to bathe in the Arno. He drew them at the moment the alarm is sounded, and the men, all naked, rush to arms. So splendid is their action that nothing survives of ancient or of modern art which touches the same lofty point of excellence; and, as I have already said, the design of the great Leonardo was itself most admirably beautiful. These two cartoons stood, one in the Palace of the Medici, the other in the hall of the Pope. So long as they remained intact they were the school of the world. Though the divine Michelangelo in later life finished that great chapel of Pope Julius, he never rose halfway to the same pitch of power; his genius never afterwards attained to the force of those first studies." Leonardo, after having begun painting a group of horsemen on the wall, abandoned the task with characteristic fickleness, and Michelangelo having been summoned to Rome in the beginning of 1505 by Pope Julius II., left his work unfinished. It is said that a worthless rival named Baccio Bandinelli, envious of Michelangelo's greatness, destroyed the famous cartoon of Pisa. A sketch of the whole composition may be seen in the Albertina Gallery at Vienna, but perhaps the most complete copy of the cartoon is the monochrome painting belonging to the Earl of Leicester, at Holkham Hall. THE TRAGEDY OF THE TOMB