With this, if you see that they are diligent and do well, give it to them and make me their creditor, as I was to Buonarroto when he went away.

If they are not diligent, and do badly, place it to my account at Santa Maria Nuova.

It is not yet time to buy.
"Your MICHAEL ANGELO, in Rome.
"If you are speaking to the father of the boy, put the matter nicely, mannerly; that he is a good lad, but too genteel, and that he is not fit for my work, and that he must send for him."(111) [Image #22] ATHLETE SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME (_By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence_) The more gentle tone of the postscript is very characteristic.

Outwardly he would be rough, consumed with anger and indignation; but inwardly his nature was kindly to a degree to those he had about him.
Condivi tells us of the delay in the works in the Sistine due to the mould on the surface of the fresco, and of the haste of Julius.

The progress was fast enough, one would have thought, even for that exacting Pontiff; for although the whole work consists, on counting heads, of some three hundred and ninety-four figures, the majority ten feet high; the prophets and sibyls, twelve in number, would be eighteen feet high if they stood up; yet by the following letters to his brother Buonarroto, of October 1509, we know he had finished the first half, consisting probably of some two hundred figures, even then; or assuming that he began to paint when the assistants were dismissed in January 1509, he worked at the rate of about a figure a day.
_To_ BUONARROTO DI LODOVICO DI BUONARROTA, _in Florence_.
_From_ ROME, _the 17th of October, 1509._ "BUONARROTO,--I got the bread: it is good, but it is not good enough to make a trade of, for there would be little gain.