These two cartoons stood, one in the Palace of the Medici, the other in the hall of the Pope.

So long as they remained intact they were the school of the world.

Though the divine Michael Angelo in later life finished that great chapel of Pope Julius, he never rose half-way to the same pitch of power; his genius never afterwards attained to the force of those first studies." These years spent under the shadow of the Duomo, away from which no Florentine is happy, working at his sculptures and drawings, were probably some of the happiest years of Michael Angelo's whole life..