The Awakening Slave

Look at the tool marks. Michelangelo worked with a point chisel to rough out the form, then a toothed claw chisel whose parallel grooves you can see across the chest and thighs, and finally a flat chisel and abrasives for the few areas he took further. He carved from the front inward, as if the figure were lying in a bath and the water was slowly being drained, so the parts nearest the surface, the knee and the chest, emerge first. Nothing here is polished. Whether he stopped because the tomb project changed or because the roughness pleased him is a question art historians still argue over.

The four Prisoners were begun for the tomb of Pope Julius the Second, a project that haunted Michelangelo for forty years and shrank from a free-standing monument with forty figures to the modest wall tomb now in Rome. These figures were left in his Florentine workshop and given by his nephew to Duke Cosimo de' Medici, who set them in the grotto of the Boboli Gardens, where they stood among rocks and dripping water for three centuries before coming here in nineteen hundred and nine. Placed along the route to the David, they show the finished masterpiece and the struggle behind it side by side.

Did You Know? For three hundred years the Prisoners stood in a damp artificial grotto in the Boboli Gardens, surrounded by sculpted rocks, as if they really were emerging from the earth.