‘It was the pattern of Michelangelo’s life’, writes Mr Michael Ayrton, introducing a translation of the great artist’s sonnets, ‘that in painting, an activity of which he thought little, his greatest designs were completed . . . whereas in sculpture, which he considered his proper profession, all his greatest projects failed to materialise or remained in some compromise form to mock him’. A story, then, of disappointment by distraction: an artist of outstanding genius in several media, but profoundly drawn to one in particular, finds himself repeatedly diverted, by circumstances and his patrons, from the work he most wanted to do; the result being the Sistine ceiling and the Last Judgment on the one hand, and on the other the unfinished tombs for Julius II and the Medici. And while those paintings are superb, they are unmistakably, almost pathetically, the work of a man whose deepest impulse was to carve in stone. ‘Say a good word, John’, wrote Michelangelo in the bizarre sonnet-letter to a friend about the discomforts of painting the Sistine vault lying on his back, ‘for these dead paintings of mine... for this place is no good and I’m no painter’. And many years later, in a letter to Benedetto Varchi, he tries to define what he felt about the two arts. It is a hesitant, halting letter because the old man was genuinely puzzled. Varchi, writing ‘philosophically’, had declared painting and sculpture to be really ‘the same thing’, and though Michelangelo knew by experience that they weren’t, he was too humble to contradict. He had always assumed, he replied, that painting was good ‘the closer it approached relief and relief was bad the nearer it got to painting, so that I’ve always thought of sculpture as the guiding-light (la lantema) of painting and that the two differ as the sun and the moon’. Now however he has changed his mind, yielding to Varchi’s metaphysics, agreeing that these arts ‘are one and the same’.