“Michelangelo had only this to say:

“I have finished the chapel I have been painting: the Pope is very well satisfied,” he wrote his father. Then he added: “Other things have not turned out for me as I’d hoped. For this I blame the times, which are very unfavorable to our art.”

Today, we call those “unfavorable” times the High Renaissance.”

Patrick Bringley - All the Beauty in the World