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In April 1532 Michelangelo signed yet another contract for a job that had been haunting him for almost 30 years: the tomb of Pope Julius II. The first grand design had been for dozens of figures. By 1532 it had shrunk again and again, and the pope was long dead. This marble was cut for one of those late, reduced versions. A young man, crowned with oak leaves, twists up and back over a bent older figure trapped beneath him, who Michelangelo barely began to carve at all. That spiralling pose, the whole body turning through space, is the thing sculptors would copy for a century. The figure never reached any tomb. Michelangelo left Florence for good in 1534 and left the statue in his studio. Decades later his family gave it to Duke Cosimo de' Medici, and it went here, into the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio.