“Michelangelo,” God called out anxiously, “who is in the stone?” Then he answered in a dull voice, “You, O Lord, who else? But I can’t get at You.”

And then God felt that He was in the stone too, and He became afraid and felt closed in. The whole of heaven was a stone, and He was shut up in the middle of it, relying on Michelangelo’s hands to liberate Him; and He heard them coming, though still at a distance.

But the master was again at his work. He kept thinking: You are nothing but a small block, and nobody else could find a human being in you. But I feel a shoulder here—it is the shoulder of Joseph of Arimathea; and here Mary bends, I feel her trembling hands, holding Jesus, our Lord, who has just died on the Cross. If there is room for these three in this small piece of marble, why should I not be able to draw out of a large rock a whole sleeping race? And with broad strokes he freed from the marble the three figures of the Pietà, but he did not entirely take away the stony veil from their faces, as though he feared their deep grief might fall upon his hands and lame them. And so he fled to another piece of stone. But in each piece of work he lacked the courage to give a brow its full clarity or a shoulder it purest roundness, and if he was forming a woman, he stopped shy of putting the final smile on her lips so as not to expose her full beauty.

At this time, he was designing the monument for Julius della Rovere’s tomb. His idea was to build a mountain over the Iron Pope and create a race to people that mountain. Filled with many obscure plans, he went out to his marble quarry. Its steep slope rose above a poor village. Amid the olive trees and old faded rock, the freshly split surfaces looked like a large pale face under an old man’s hair. Michelangelo stood for a long time in front of its veiled brow. Suddenly he saw beneath it two gigantic eyes of stone, which were looking at him. And Michelangelo felt his form grow under the influence of that gaze. Now he too towered above the landscape, and it seemed to him that he had stood facing this mountain like a brother for all eternity. The valley fell away below him as below a climber, the huts crowded together like cattle, and the face in the rock looked nearer and easier to relate to under its white stony veils. It had a waiting expression, motionless yet on the verge of movement. Michelangelo reflected: “You cannot be broken into pieces, since you are but one.” And then he raised his voice, “I will complete you; you are my work.” And he turned back toward Florence. He saw a star and the tower of the cathedral. And it was evening around his feet.