He found a friend in another Lorenzo, the son of Pierfrancesco dei Medici, for whom he executed a statue of the boy St. John. Having also carved a recumbent Cupid in imitation of the antique, it was suggested to him by the same patron that it should be so tinted and treated as to look like a real antique, and sold accordingly. Michelangelo for amusement lent himself to the counterfeit, and the piece was then actually sold for a large sum, as a genuine work of antiquity, to a Roman collector, Raffaelle Riario, cardinal di San Giorgio ; the dealer appropriating the profits. When the cardinal discovered the fraud he caused the dealer to refund ; it was represented to Michelangelo that if he went to Rome the amateur who had just involuntarily paid so high a tribute to his skill would certainly befriend him. He arrived at Rome for the first time at the end of June 1496. He received no countenance from the cardinal di San Giorgio ; neither did the banished Piero dei Medici, who also was now living at Rome, do anything to help him. But Michelangelo won the favour of a Roman nobleman, Jacopo Galli, and through him of the French cardinal Jean de Villiers de la Grolaie, abbot of St. Denis. From the former he received a commission for a "Cupid" (sometimes identified with the cupid in the Victoria and Albert Museum but this, if by Michelangelo, must belong to a later date) and a "Bacchus," (Bargello, Florence), from the latter for a "Pieta" (St. Peter's, Rome). Equal originality of conception and mag nificence of technical execution mark the two contrasted subjects.
Michelangelo's stay in Rome at this time lasted from the summer of 1496 till that of 150i. The interval had been one of extreme political distraction at Florence, which had created an atmosphere most unfavourable to art. Nevertheless Ludovico Buonarroti, who in the troubles of 1494 had lost his permanent appointment in the customs, and had come to regard his son Michelangelo as the mainstay of his house, had been repeatedly urging him to come home. A spirit of family duty and family pride was the ruling principle in all Michelangelo's conduct. Dur ing the best years of his life he submitted himself sternly and without a murmur to pinching hardships and almost super human labour for the sake of his father and brothers. Having now, after an illness, come home in 1501, Michelangelo was re quested by the cardinal Francesco Piccolomini to adorn with a number of sculptured figures a shrine already begun in the cathedral of Siena in honour of Pope Pius II. Four only of these figures were ever executed, and those not apparently, or only in small part, by the master's hand.
A work of greater interest in Florence itself had diverted him from his engagement to his Sienese patrons. This was the execu tion of the famous colossal statue of David, popularly known as "the Giant." It was carved out of a huge block of marble on which another sculptor, Agostino d'Antonio, had begun unsuccess fully to work forty years before, and which had been lying idle ever since. Michelangelo had here a difficult problem before him.
Without much regard to the traditional treatment of the subject or the historical character of his hero, he carved out of the vast but cramped mass of material an adolescent, frowning colossus, tensely watchful and self-balanced in preparation for his great action. The result amazed every beholder by its freedom and science of execution and its victorious energy of expression. The best artists of Florence debated on what site it should be set up, and the terrace of the palace of the Signory was chosen, in preference to the neighbouring Loggia dei Lanzi. Here accord ingly the colossal "David" of Michelangelo took, in the month of May 1504, the place which it continued to hold until in 1882 it was removed for the sake of protection to a hall in the Academy of Fine Arts, where it inevitably looks crushed and cabined. Other works of sculpture belong to the same period : among them a second "David," in bronze and on a smaller scale, com missioned by the marechal Pierre Rohan and left by the young master to be finished by Benedetto da Rovezzano, who despatched it to France in 1508 and which is no longer extant ; a great rough-hewn "St. Matthew" (Bargello, Florence), begun but never completed for the cathedral of Florence ; a "Madonna and Child" executed on the commission of a merchant of Bruges and still to be seen in the Church of Notre Dame at Bruges ; and two unfinished bas-reliefs of the same subject, one at the Diploma Gallery, Royal Academy, London; the other in the Bargello, Florence.