"He would break a work in pieces," says Vasari, "either because the block was hard and full of flaws and sparks shot out from under the chisel, or because the uncompromising judgment of this man was never contented with anything that he did, which is easily proved by the fact that so few of the works of his maturity are complete; the only finished ones dated from his youth."
The Florentine sculptor Tiberio Calcagni, who was a friend as well as his assistant at S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, found the debris of a Pietà one day, and asked why he had destroyed "so admirable a work." Michelangelo told him that it was partly the fault of his servant Urbino, who urged him every day to finish it, when he was already annoyed by a flaw in the marble so that he had lost patience and had broken it. He would have destroyed it entirely but that his servant Antonio "had begged for what remained." Tiberio bought the marble from Antonio for two hundred gold crowns and asked Michelangelo's permission to finish it for their mutual friend Francesco Bandini. Michelangelo was entirely willing, and the group was restored by Tiberio, who completed several parts of it, but Bandini, Michelangelo and Tiberio all died and it was never finished.[106]
It is all the more moving for that reason. In the half-shadow behind the high altar in Florence it stirs one with indescribable emotion. Perhaps no other work of Michelangelo is so human or speaks so directly to the soul. "From heart to heart," as Beethoven wrote at the end of his mass in D. It is the expression of those long nights when he was alone face to face with his sorrow and spoke only to himself. He represents himself in the form of an old man, in a monk's cowl, bending with infinite sadness and tenderness to support the sinking body of the dead Christ.
In this piece of stone hardly blocked out smoulders deep sorrow and an agony of pain. But what great love is in that suffering, in the scarcely modelled face of the mother with closed eyes and parted lips, and in the tender movement of the hand which rests on the naked breast of her son, whose head has sunk against her shoulder. How much Michelangelo has softened since his early work, how far this feeling is from the implacable heroism of his youth, how far it is indeed from the lovely Pietà of St. Peter's, where serene beauty rises above the sorrow. Here he suffers and abandons himself to the suffering. What matters a lack of proportion and an uncertain composition?[107] The work is unique in its intimacy. It is his whole soul laid bare.