Michelangelo was forty-five years old when he was commissioned to create a chapel of tombs for the Medici family. He spent fifteen years of work on this chapel and felt forced to leave Florence before its completion. Those fifteen years were among the darkest in a life that became ever more tormented. While he worked in the chapel his father and favorite brother died and his thoughts were much concerned with death, with the shortness and futility of life. He was a devout Christian but he lived in an age of increasing disbelief. He championed the principle of political freedom but he saw the city of Florence torn with domestic strife and the peninsula of Italy dominated by foreign powers. He was one of the greatest artists that the world has ever known but he was continually frustrated in his efforts to complete the works which obsessed him. It was inevitable -- the melancholy and the disappointments of his life found expression in the great statues which he created for the Medici Chapel.

The tomb began as a memorial for two of the younger Medici; Lorenzo, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Giuliano, his grandson. It contains idealized portraits of the two Medici, an unfinished statue of the Madonna and four allegorical figures representing the passing of time; time the great consumer of life. The allegorical figures are heroic, possessed of almost superhuman power, and yet they seem overcome by lassitude and droop with exhaustion. They have been termed a "withering commentary upon the futility of all human endeavor before the forces of ignorance and evil."

The reclining figures of Twilight and Dawn are placed atop the sarcophagus of Lorenzo whose contemplative statue is seated in a niche above them. Exhaustion from the day is apparent in the figure representing Twilight. His bulging muscles remind us of the potential power of the human being and his capacity to accomplish, but discouragement prevails: he seems only to wait for the night to come. Dawn slowly awakens; she seems ready to rise and to face the day. Her figure is massive and muscular; Michelangelo was not interested in depicting a delicacy of form. The figure is epic, it is eternal, larger than life; it is part of an allegory expressing the cycle of life and death.

Directly opposite these two figures the statues of Night and Day surmount the sarcophagus of Giuliano dei Medici. His idealized statue probably represents the active life in contrast to the contemplative life represented in the Lorenzo statue. To Michelangelo these were two aspects of the human soul. Day takes the form of a powerful muscular man. Although he reclines, his portrayal is the most active of the four figures; there is a great torsion in his twisted body, he seems ready to unleash his great power, to face the world and all its vicissitudes. His blinded eyes are but one of the unsolved enigmas presented by these figures. Was the statue unfinished or did his blindness convey some hidden meaning? Was it a symbol of death expressing the vanity of life? No one knows; the four figures are the most puzzling of all that Michelangelo created. We know that they convey a meaning which he alone could explain and we also know that we will never with certainty decipher that meaning. The figures seem overwhelmed by grief, they express the transience of life and the perpetual cycle -- with dawn we are born, with day we live, with twilight we decline, with night we die; perhaps to be born again with the dawn. The statue of Night brings to our mind the lines which Michelangelo wrote shortly before his death:

Sleep is dear to me and dearer still to be of stone
O do not wake me, speak softly... speak softly.