His two pictures of this shape in Florence perhaps helped Michael Angelo in the three compositions we have been considering; and this is the only debt Michael Angelo owes to the Umbrian painter.
Their way of looking at the nude and their ideals of its beauty are so absolutely different, the one from the other, that possibly the Florentine could hardly bear to look at the work of the Umbrian.
[Image #10] THE CARTOON OF PISA FROM THE MONOCHROME AT HOLKHAM HALL (_By permission of the Earl of Leicester_) In August 1504, Michael Angelo was commissioned to prepare cartoons for the decoration of a wall in the Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo Vecchio, opposite the wall for which Leonardo da Vinci was already preparing designs.

Michael Angelo had a workshop given him in the Hospital of the Dyers at San Onofrio, under the date October 31, 1504; a minute of expenditure shows that paper for the cartoon was provided.

Leonardo's design was the famous "Fight for the Standard." Michael Angelo chose an episode from the war with Pisa, when, on July 28, 1364, a band of four hundred Florentines were surprised bathing in the Arno by Sir John Hawkwood (Giovanni Acuto) and his cavalry, then in the service of the Pisans, a subject that enabled Michael Angelo to express his delight in the beauty of the human form, and his power of drawing and foreshortening the naked limbs of the bathers as they hurry out of the river and don their armour at the sound of the alarm.

This great central work of Michael Angelo's prime has disappeared, and we must be very careful in studying it to allow for the weakness of the work of the copyists and engravers who preserved what little record of it is left for us, especially in the drawing of the nude.

If we compare the vault of the Sistine Chapel with the contemporary engravings we shall be able to estimate the enormous difference between the cartoon, which may have been the greatest work of art produced in Italy, and the copies of it that exist.