But he tried at times to slumber, sunk in a wise passiveness.

Then he communed with the poets, the prophets, and the prose-writers of his country.

We can well imagine, therefore, that, tired with the labours of the chisel or the brush, he gladly gave himself to composition, leaving half finished on his easel things which had for him their adequate accomplishment.
I think it necessary to make these suggestions, because, in my opinion, Michelangelo's inner life and his literary proclivities have been hitherto too much neglected in the scheme of his psychology.
Dazzled by the splendour of his work, critics are content to skip spaces of months and years, during which the creative genius of the man smouldered.

It is, as I shall try to show, in those intervals, dimly revealed to us by what remains of his poems and his correspondence, that the secret of this man, at once so tardy and so energetic; has to be discovered.
A great master of a different temperament, less solitary, less saturnine, less sluggish, would have formed a school, as Raffaello did.

Michelangelo formed no school, and was incapable of confiding the execution of his designs to any subordinates.