Hawthorne said of this statue, "No such grandeur and majesty have elsewhere been put into human shape. It is all a miracle—the deep repose, and the deep life within it. It is as much a miracle to have achieved this as to make a statue that would rise up and walk.... This statue is one of the things which I look at with highest enjoyment, but also with grief and impatience, because I feel that I do not come at all to that which it involves, and that by and by I must go away and leave it forever. How wonderful! To take a block of marble, and convert it wholly into thought, and to do it through all the obstructions and impediments of drapery."
Some authorities believe that the statue usually called Lorenzo was intended for Giuliano. Michael Angelo himself, when remonstrated with because the portraits were not correct likenesses, replied that he "did not suppose people a hundred years later would care much how the dukes looked!"
Under this statue are Dawn and Twilight. Ruskin calls these, with Night and Day, "Four ineffable types, not of darkness nor of day—not of morning nor evening, but of the departure and the resurrection, the twilight and the dawn, of the souls of men."
Day is a gigantic figure of a man; Night, of a woman in a profound sleep, with her foot resting on a thick bundle of poppy-heads. When this statue was exhibited for the first time, Giovanni Batista Strozzi wrote a verse, and attached it to the marble:—
"Carved by an Angel, in this marble white
Sweetly reposing, lo, the Goddess Night!
Calmly she sleeps, and so must living be:
Awake her gently; she will speak to thee."
To which Michael Angelo wrote the following reply:—
"Grateful is sleep, whilst wrong and shame survive