Like the plans for Julius II, the plans for the Medici collapsed. Clement VII died on September 28, 1538. Michelangelo was at that time away from Florence and he never went back there. Duke Alessandro de' Medici hated him, and only his fear of the pope prevented the tyrant from assassinating him. Michelangelo therefore left Florence (where his brother Buonarroto died in January, 1534) just after he had lost his father, Lodovico, in June of that same year. Nothing bound him any longer to his own country, and he was never to see it again.
Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-1512).]
That was the end of the chapel of the Medici. It was never completed.[49] What we know of it to-day is only a very far-away suggestion of what he had dreamed. Barely the lifeless skeleton of the architectural decoration is left. Michelangelo had only made (partially) seven statues--Lorenzo da Urbino, Giuliano de Nemours, the four allegorical figures and the Madonna--and he had barely begun some of the others which were planned; he had abandoned to Raffaelo da Montelupo and Giovanni Montorsoli the figures of S. Cosmo and S. Damien for the tomb of Lorenzo the Magnificent and to Tribolo the figures for the tomb of Giuliano the brother of Lorenzo, which were to represent the Earth crowned with cypress, her head bowed, weeping, and Heaven with lifted arms, radiant with joy. When these statues were ready to be placed no one knew where they should go. Vasari inquired in vain of Michelangelo in 1562 what statues he had intended for the empty niches beside the captains, above the doors and in the pavilions at the corners and "what sort of painting he had planned for the walls." Evidently the Medici Chapel, so bare and cold to-day, was to have had a complete decoration of painting and sculpture of which it is impossible for us to form any idea.
Almost the same thing is true of the Laurentian Library. Michelangelo never took any interest in it except in 1525-1526, when the pope wanted him to write about it almost every week. When he left Florence he had only completed the construction of the vestibule and the ceiling of the chief structure. The staircase had not been begun. When the Grand Duke Cosmo wished to have it finished by Tribolo in 1558 no model of Michelangelo's could be found. Vasari begged him to say what his plan had been and Michelangelo answered that he would tell him willingly if he could remember it, but he had only a vague idea, as if in a dream, of a certain staircase, but he did not think it could be the one he had planned, because it was absurd.[50]