This cartoon has perished, and report accuses Baccio Bandinelli of tearing it in pieces, either that others might not derive advantage from viewing it, or because from partiality to Vinci, and hatred to Bonarruoti, he wished to remove a subject of comparison, that might exalt the reputation of the latter above that of Lionardo. This circumstance is not authenticated, nor are we much interested in the supposed criminal, who though eminent as a designer and a sculptor, painted a very few pieces, that may almost all be reduced to an Ebriety of Noah, and the Imprisonment of the Fathers of the Church. Baccio soon renounced the pencil, and Michelangiolo appears to have done the same, for he was called to Rome by Julius II. as a sculptor, and when the Pope, about 1508, asked him to paint the ceiling of the chapel, he declined it, and wished to transfer the commission to Raffaello. He was, however, constrained to undertake it, and, unaccustomed to work in fresco, he invited some of the best painters in this branch from Florence,[145] that they might assist, or rather that they might instruct him. When he had acquired what he deemed necessary, he effaced their labours entirely, and set about the work without an assistant. When the task was about half finished, he exhibited it for a little time to the public. He then applied himself to the other part, but proceeding more slowly than the impatience of the pontiff could endure, he was compelled by threats to use quicker despatch, and without assistance finished the greater part, then incomplete, in twenty months. I have said that he was unaided, for such was the delicacy of his taste, that no artist could please him; and as in sculpture, every piercer, file, and chisel, which he used, was the work of his own hands, so in painting, "he prepared his own colours, and did not commit the mixing and other necessary manipulations to mechanics or to boys."[146] Here may be seen those grand and finely varied figures of the Prophets and the Sybils, the style of which is pronounced by Lomazzo, an impartial judge, because an artist of a different school, "to be the finest in the world."[147] There, indeed, the dignity of the aspects, the solemn majesty of the eyes, a certain wild and uncommon casting of the drapery, and the attitudes, whether representing rest or motion, announce an order of beings who hold converse with the Deity, and whose mouths utter what he inspires. Amid this display of genius, the figure most admired by Vasari is that of Isaiah, "who, absorbed in meditation, places his right hand in a book, to denote where he had been reading; and with his left elbow on the book, and his cheek resting on that hand, he turns round his head, without moving the rest of his body, on being called by one of the children that are behind him; a figure which, if attentively studied, might fully teach the precepts of a master." No less science is displayed in his pictures of the Creation of the World, of the Deluge,