From the Piazza Madonna, at the back of San Lorenzo, we enter a chilly vestibule, the burial vault of less important members of the families of the Medicean Grand Dukes, and ascend to the _Sagrestia Nuova_, where the last male descendants of Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent lie. Although the idea of adding some such mausoleum to San Lorenzo appears to have originated with Leo X., this New Sacristy was built by Michelangelo for Clement VII., commenced while he was still the Cardinal Giulio and finished in 1524, before the Library was constructed. Its form was intended to correspond with that of Brunelleschi's Old Sacristy, and it was to contain four sepulchral monuments. Two of these, the only two that were actually constructed, were for the younger Lorenzo, titular Duke of Urbino (who died in 1519, the son of Piero and nephew of Pope Leo), and the younger Giuliano, Duke of Nemours (who died in 1516, the third son of the Magnificent and younger brother of Leo). It is not quite certain for whom the other two monuments were to have been, but it is most probable that they were for the fathers of the two Medicean Popes, Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother the elder Giuliano, whose remains were translated hither by Duke Cosimo I. and rediscovered a few years ago. Michelangelo commenced the statues before the third expulsion of the Medici, worked on them in secret while he was fortifying Florence against Pope Clement before the siege, and returned to them, after the downfall of the Republic, as the condition of obtaining the Pope's pardon. He resumed work, full of bitterness at the treacherous overthrow of the Republic, tormented by the heirs of Pope Julius II., whose tomb he had been forced to abandon, suffering from insomnia and shattered health, threatened with death by the tyrant Alessandro. When he left Florence finally in 1534, just before the death of Clement, the statues had not even been put into their places. Neither of the ducal statues is a portrait, but they appear to represent the active and contemplative lives, like the Leah and Rachel on the tomb of Pope Julius II. at Rome. On the right sits Giuliano, holding the baton of command as Gonfaloniere of the Church. His handsome sensual features to some extent recall those of the victorious youth in the allegory in the Bargello. He holds his baton somewhat loosely, as though he half realised the baseness of the historical part he was doomed to play, and had not got his heart in it. Opposite is Lorenzo, immersed in profound thought, "ghastly as a tyrant's dream." What visions are haunting him of the sack of Prato, of the atrocities of the barbarian hordes in the Eternal City, of the doom his house has brought upon Florence? Does he already smell the blood that his daughter will shed, fifty years later, on St. Bartholomew's day? Here he sits, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning puts it:--