El esclavo moribundo

Pope Julius II died in 1513, and his heirs wanted the vast tomb Michelangelo had promised him cut down to something smaller. In the middle of those renegotiations Michelangelo carved this over-life-size figure, a young man with one arm raised over his head, eyes closed, his body sinking as if into sleep or death. He is one of a pair of bound captives meant to line the monument. Look at the back and the base and you can still see the marble left rough, the chisel marks unsmoothed, a lump of uncut stone clinging to the right side. The figure seems to be surfacing out of the block rather than standing free of it. The tomb kept shrinking over the decades and these captives never joined it. Michelangelo eventually gave this one away to a host who had nursed him through an illness.