After 1513, when Julius II died, Michel angelo undertook a façade for the church of Saint Lorenzo in Florence. This front was never finished; but not long after he began the building of a new sacristy for this church, in which square, room, very finely adorned with classical architectural forms, are the two re markable tombs of the princes Lorenzo and Giuliano dei Medici. These monuments have each a seated statue of the prince in question, raised high above the sarcophagus; and on the lid of the sarcophagus two colossal reclining figures, in each case one man and one woman. The sculptures are not all completed. The ex traordinary power of their modeling has made these monuments very famous in the modern world.
About 1535 Michelangelo settled finally in Rome, and from that time until his death was very much occupied as an architect in coauec lion with the great church of Saint Peter. The building had been going on for many years, ind different architects had successively changed the design, so that Michelangelo took up he work at that point where it became necess ry to roof the central mass. This he did by means of the famous cupola which dominates the city of Rome and the country around, although he rounded shell of stone itself was not erected during his lifetime.
As an architect Michelangelo was not, on the whole, beneficial to Italy or to the art of the 16th century, because he had never, as a youth, studied construction or the use of details, and because his almost exclusive devotion to• more elaborate and organic forms than th -se possible to architectural masses, prevented his° designing such features as frontons and consols with gravity and simplicity. The architecture inspired by him, and more especially that pro duced by his immediate successors, ran to ex travagance; and the worst period of Italian decorative art was to follow upon his own epoch of work. The sculpture of his later years is much less important and much less in quantity than might have been expected; but the w ,rk upon the church occupied his energies, and in 1535 he was appointed by Pope Paul III, archi tect, sculptor and painter to the papal palace, and he began work immediately upon the east wall of the Sistine Chapel. Here he painted
that prodigious 'Last Judgment' filling all te wall above the altar, including the lunette, up to the nearly semicircular vault. The pic ture is, like the ceiling paintings, entirely a study of the human body in vigorous action, and in highly studied pose. As a work of color, or even of light and shade, it is almost unrecog nizable for what it was, as the smoke of the candles on the altar has caused very great changes in color, and has led to repainting, and because of certain painted additions made in the next century in order to disguise the com plete nudity of the figures.
Throughout his life Michelangelo had been a writer of verse, and it is known that import ant sonnets of his were left by him. These, however, were edited in a destructive manner by his nephew, so much so that we have at the present day no certain knowledge, even, of what the poems were as they left Michelangelo's hand. This part of his intellectual life has been treated with great thoroughness by John Ad Symonds in his life of the artist (1892); and on which Walter Pater writes fascinat ingly in 'The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry' (1912). The frescoes of the Sistine Chapel have been peculiarly the study of Heath ilson who, about the middle of the 19th cen tury, had a scaffolding erected in the chapel and studied the paintings inch by inch, and who recorded his observations in a valuable book (1876). Apart from these two books and the life by Harford (1837), the best book on Michelangelo is the volume of the 'Gazette de Beaux-Arts,' published in 1876. This volume contains papers by the sculptor, Eugene Guil laume, the architect, Charles Gartner, and the competent writers, Charles Blanc, Paul Mainz, A Mizieres and Anatole de Montaiglon. Karl Frey's (Michaelagniolo Buonarrotti' publica tion of which began in 1907, and Thode's 'Michelangelo und das Ende der Renaissance' (1902-12), are among recent authoritative studies.