We may fancy L'Indaco, Buggiardini, and the rest, staring with amazement at the huge figures and the great flowing lines before them, and trying to fit their dry manner of painting to the new grandeur of design.
It could but end in one way.

The clause prepared beforehand by Michael Angelo in the contracts came into effect, and they had to be sent away, with plenty of grumbling on their part, no doubt.

Michael Angelo was too exacting in the perfection of his taste to allow any work short of the absolute ideal he had imagined.

Unlike Raphael, who was working in the neighbouring stanze, and who was contented to pass, and some would have us believe to execute, ill-turned foreshortenings and false drawing, so long as his general effect was preserved and the work done in reasonable time.
Perhaps his gentle and sunlike genius could not bear to use harsh words and shut the door against the mediocre men with whom he was surrounded.
Michael Angelo could brook no imperfection of whatever kind, so that he destroyed all that his assistants had done and shut himself up alone in the chapel.

He was the only man who could do the work to his satisfaction; so he did it, alone and unaided, as to the actual painting, and produced a work unequalled in perfection since Phidias worked in Athens.
The dismissal of his assistants appears to have begun about the New Year 1509.