reply, but also communicating personally upon the subject with Buonarroti.  Three of Michelangelo’s letters on the subject to the Duke have been preserved.  After giving a short history of the project, and alluding to the fact that Leo X. began the church, he says that the Florentines had appointed a building committee of five men, at whose request he made several designs.  One of these they selected, and according to his own opinion it was the best.  “This I will have copied and drawn out more clearly than I have been able to do it, on account of old age, and will send it to your Most Illustrious Lordship.”  The drawings were executed and carried to Florence by the hand of Tiberio Calcagni.  Vasari, who has given a long account of this design, says that Calcagni not only drew the plans, but that he also completed a clay model of the whole church within the space of two days, from which the Florentines caused a larger wooden model to be constructed.  Michelangelo must have been satisfied with his conception, for he told the building-committee that “if they carried it out, neither the Romans nor the Greeks ever erected so fine an edifice in any of their temples.  Words the like of which neither before nor afterwards issued from his lips; for he was exceedingly modest.”  Vasari, who had good opportunities for studying the model, pronounced it to be “superior in beauty, richness and variety of invention to any temple which was ever seen.”  The building was begun, and 5000 crowns were spent upon it.  Then money or will failed.  The model and drawings perished.  Nothing remains for certain to show what Michelangelo’s intentions were.  The present church of S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Strada Giulia is the work of Giacomo della Porta, with a facade by Alessandro Galilei.

Of Tiberio Calcagni, the young Florentine sculptor and architect, who acted like a kind of secretary or clerk to Michelangelo, something may here be said.  The correspondence of this artist with Lionardo Buonarroti shows him to have been what Vasari calls him, “of gentle manners and discreet behaviour.”  He felt both veneration and attachment for the aged master, and was one of the small group of intimate friends who cheered his last years.  We have seen that Michelangelo consigned the shattered Pieta to his care; and Vasari tells us that he also wished him to complete the bust of Brutus, which had been begun, at Donato Giannotti’s request, for the Cardinal Ridolfi.  This bust is said to have been modelled from an ancient cornelian in the possession of a certain Giuliano Ceserino.  Michelangelo not only blocked the marble out, but brought it nearly to completion, working the surface with very fine-toothed chisels.  The sweetness of Tiberio Calcagni’s nature is proved by the fact that he would not set his own hand to this masterpiece of sculpture.  As in the case of the Pieta, he left Buonarroti’s work untouched, where mere repairs were not required.  Accordingly we still can trace the fine-toothed marks