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It appears from the draft of a letter without date that some altercation between Michelangelo and the Medici preceded this rupture. He had been withdrawn from Serravezza to Florence in order that he might plan the new buildings at S. Lorenzo; and the workmen of the Opera del Duomo continued the quarrying business in his absence.

His correspondence from Pietra Santa and Serravezza, where he lived when he was opening the Florentine quarries of Monte Altissimo, does not begin, with any certainty, until March 1518. We have indeed one letter written to Girolamo del Bardella of Porto Venere upon the 6th of August, without date of year.

This was sent from Serravezza, and Milanesi, when he first made use of it, assigned it to 1517. Gotti, following that indication, asserts that Michelangelo began his operations at Monte Altissimo in July 1517; but Milanesi afterwards changed his opinion, and assigned it to the year 1519.

Thence he had his friend transported on the backs of men to Serravezza, and after his recovery sent him to pick up strength in his native city of Pistoja. In one of the Ricordi he reckons the cost of all this at 33-1/2 ducats.

Pietra Santa is a little city on the Tuscan seaboard; Serravezza is a still smaller fortress-town at the foot of the Carrara mountains. Monte Altissimo rises above it; and on the flanks of that great hill lie the quarries Della Finocchiaja, which Michelangelo opened at the command of Pope Leo.

This yard, encumbered with the marbles for S. Lorenzo, must have been in the Via Mozza. Early in the spring he removed to Serravezza, and resumed the work of bringing down his blocked-out columns from the quarries. One of these pillars, six of which he says were finished, was of huge size, intended probably for the flanks to the main door at S. Lorenzo.

Heath Wilson, seeking after an allegory, is fain to believe that it represents Michelangelo's own state of subjection while employed upon the Serravezza quarries. Last comes the so-called Adonis of the Bargello Palace, which not improbably was designed for one of the figures prostrate below the feet of a victorious Genius.

The narrative of Dante's journey through Hell and Purgatory, which is put into Michelangelo's mouth, if we are to believe that he really made it extempore and without book, shows a most minute knowledge of the Inferno. Michelangelo's doings at Serravezza can be traced with some accuracy during the summers of 1518 and 1519.

Stagg and I used to stroll up to Fiesole, by the villa where Boccaccio's party of story-tellers met, and look up old pictures in the village church; we measured the proportions of the chapel on the hill of Saint Miniato, and he endeavored in vain to imitate the hue of the light as it fell through the veined marble of Serravezza; we spent contemplative afternoons in the house of Michael Angelo, and went up to Vallambrosa, at the risk of our necks, to look at a Giotto no bigger than a tea-plate.