large number of figures in a single plan.  He clearly intended at some time to range the Medicean statues in pairs, and studied several types of curve for their sepulchral urns.  The feature common to all of them is a niche, of door or window shape, with a powerfully indented architrave.  Reminiscences of the design for the tomb of Julius are not infrequent; and it may be remarked, as throwing a side-light upon that irrecoverable project of his earlier manhood, that the figures posed upon the various spaces of architecture differ in their scale.  Two belonging to this series are of especial interest, since we learn from them how he thought of introducing the rivers at the basement of the composition.  It seems that he hesitated long about the employment of circular spaces in the framework of the marble panelling.  These were finally rejected.  One of the finest and most comprehensive of the drawings I am now describing contains a rough draft of a curved sarcophagus, with an allegorical figure reclining upon it, indicating the first conception of the Dawn.  Another, blurred and indistinct, with clumsy architectural environment, exhibits two of these allegories, arranged much as we now see them at S. Lorenzo.  A river-god, recumbent beneath the feet of a female statue, carries the eye down to the ground, and enables us to comprehend how these subordinate figures were wrought into the complex harmony of flowing lines he had imagined.  The seventh study differs in conception from the rest; it stands alone.  There are four handlings of what begins like a huge portal, and is gradually elaborated into an architectural scheme containing three great niches for statuary.  It is powerful and simple in design, governed by semicircular arches—­a feature which is absent from the rest.

All these drawings are indubitably by the hand of Michelangelo, and must be reckoned among his first free efforts to construct a working plan.  The Albertina Collection at Vienna yields us an elaborate design for the sacristy, which appears to have been worked up from some of the rougher sketches.  It is executed in pen, shaded with bistre, and belongs to what I have ventured to describe as office work.  It may have been prepared for the inspection of Leo and the Cardinal.  Here we have the sarcophagi in pairs, recumbent figures stretched upon a shallow curve inverted, colossal orders of a bastard Ionic type, a great central niche framing a seated Madonna, two male figures in side niches, suggestive of Giuliano and Lorenzo as they were at last conceived, four allegorical statues, and, to crown the whole structure, candelabra of a peculiar shape, with a central round, supported by two naked genii.  It is difficult, as I have before observed, to be sure how much of the drawings executed in this way can be ascribed with safety to Michelangelo himself.  They are carefully outlined, with the precision of a working architect; but the sculptural details bear the aspect of what may be termed a generic Florentine style of draughtsmanship.