Beside that superhuman creation rich with the whole life of Michelangelo, the two gracious figures of Leah and Rachel, the work of his old age, seem a little cold and affected.
"I seemed in a dream to see a lady, young and beautiful, going through a meadow, gathering flowers, and singing she was saying, 'Let him know, whoso asks my name, that I am Leah, and I go moving my fair hands around to make myself a garland. To please me at the glass here I adorn me, but my sister Rachel never withdraws from her mirror, and sits all day. She is as fain to look with her fair eyes as I to adorn me with my hands. Her seeing, and me doing, satisfies.'"[83]
The perfume of these lovely verses of Dante penetrates Michelangelo's two statues, which are rather apart from the rest of his work. If it were not for the largeness of their conception they would recall by their "morbidezza" and their cold grace the style of Civitale and Rossellino. Michelangelo seems here to be softened and a little tamed.
The symbolical meaning of these figures is obscure, as usual with him. His intellectual quality was rarely strong enough or rather clear enough to impose itself on his artistic conceptions. It is placed in juxtaposition to them in a puerile and accessory way as in the allegorical attributes of the Medici tombs, and we can take it away without hurting the strength of the work.
As for the rest of the monument of Julius II, it is not worth mentioning.[84] It is a caricature of the great project, but at least it was finished. Michelangelo was delivered from the nightmare of his whole life.
Michelangelo cared no longer for his own glory. He thought only of the glory of God, and art had become to him merely a means of service. He wrote, "I understand now how great is the mistake, the passionate delusion in which I made of art an idol and a king."
L'affectuosa fantasia, Che l'arte mi fece idol'e monarca, Conosco or ben, com'era d'error carca....[85]
His soul "had turned to that divine love which welcomes us with arms outspread upon the cross."
L'anima, volta a quell'amor divino C'aperse a prender noi 'n croce le braccia.
He wished to consecrate all that remained of his life to the task of building for his God the temple of temples, St. Peter's.