[38] Michelangelo ended his work in April, 1520. The Christ was sent to Rome in March, 1521. Pietro Urbano worked at it from June until the middle of August when he suddenly left Rome.
Sebastiano del Piombo writes to Michelangelo in September, 1521: "Pietro Urbano has mutilated everything. In particular he has shortened the right foot and you can see clearly that he has cut off the toes: he has even shortened the fingers, especially those of the right hand which held the cross. Frizzi says that they look as if they had been made by a 'baker.' That hand does not even look like marble; you would think it had been made by a pastry cook, so stiff are the fingers. You can see, too, that he has worked at the beard and you would think he had modelled it with a blunt knife. He has also mutilated one of the nostrils, and almost spoilt the nose."
Michelangelo had to commission the sculptor, Federigo Frizzi, to finish the work. With his customary honesty he offered to make an entirely new statue for Metello Varj, who had ordered the work from him, but Varj declined. Michelangelo was so ashamed of the Christ of the Minerva that when the statue was unveiled in December, 1521, Lionardo Sellajo, one of his friends in Rome, took great care that everyone should know that it was not by Michelangelo, but that he had simply retouched it.
[39] After the death of Leo X on December 1, 1521, and during all the pontificate of Adrian VI, who died on September 23, 1523, Cardinal Giulio de' Medici had put a "mute" on all his undertakings. It is probable that during that year's respite (1522-23) Michelangelo was able to take up again the tomb of Julius II, and that he worked at the admirable Victory of the Bargello and at the scarcely blocked-in figures of the Boboli Grotto.
[40] Fifty crowns. Michelangelo only asked for fifteen.
[41] He was fifty years old. In 1517, when he was forty-two, in a letter to Domenico Buoninsegni he called himself "old." In 1523 in a letter to Cardinal Domenico Grimani, he emphasised the lessening of his strength through age. "If I work a day," he says, "I must rest for four."
[42] Thode pretends that Michelangelo did not take this seriously and that the letter which follows is "ironisch und humorvolle." Full of humor, yes, but I do not think it ironical. If there is any trace of irony it is rather on the side of the pope, who might have been making fun of Michelangelo's naiveté and of his well-known tendency to grow enthusiastic over any new undertaking, particularly the most fantastic ones. In fact after frequent exchanges of letters in October and November, 1525, Fattucci, a friend of Michelangelo, warned him secretly in December that "the Colossus was only a joke." Michelangelo had not suspected any malice in this scheme and had already pictured in his mind the bizarre Colossus to which he gave a frankly popular character, monstrous and comic, like one of Aristo's giants.