Accordingly he hewed away with fury, and bit so deep into the marble that he injured one of the Madonna's elbows.

When this happened, it was his invariable practice to abandon the piece he had begun upon, feeling that an incomplete performance was preferable to a lame conclusion.

In his old age he suffered from sleeplessness; and it was his habit to rise from bed and work upon the Pieta, wearing a thick paper cap, in which he placed a lighted candle made of goat's tallow.

This method of chiselling by the light of one candle must have complicated the technical difficulties of his labour.

But what we may perhaps surmise to have been his final motive for the rejection of the work, was a sense of his inability, with diminished powers of execution, and a still more vivid sense of the importance of the motive, to accomplish what the brain conceived.
The hand failed.