Some notion of its size may be derived from what we know about the material supplied for Lionardo's Cartoon.

This, say Crowe and Cavalcaselle, "was made up of one ream and twenty-nine quires, or about 288 square feet of royal folio paper, the mere pasting of which necessitated a consumption of eighty-eight pounds of flour, the mere lining of which required three pieces of Florentine linen." Condivi, summing up his notes of this period spent by Michelangelo at Florence, says: "He stayed there some time without working to much purpose in his craft, having taken to the study of poets and rhetoricians in the vulgar tongue, and to the composition of sonnets for his pleasure." It is difficult to imagine how Michelangelo, with all his engagements, found the leisure to pursue these literary amusements.

But Condivi's biography is the sole authentic source which we possess for the great master's own recollections of his past life.
It is, therefore, not improbable that in the sentence I have quoted we may find some explanation of the want of finish observable in his productions at this point.

Michelangelo was, to a large extent, a dreamer; and this single phrase throws light upon the expanse of time, the barren spaces, in his long laborious life.

The poems we now possess by his pen are clearly the wreck of a vast multitude; and most of those accessible in manuscript and print belong to a later stage of his development.