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The notion that Michelangelo left nearly three-fifths of his sculptural works unfinished has aroused the interest of artists and critics since the sixteenth century.1 It has led certain scholars to adopt a conflict-based theory while others have viewed the presence of the non-finito as an essential, and more importantly, intentional part of the artist's pictorial language.2 Perhaps one reason this view attained popularity is because by the end of the fifteenth century, the intendenti had already shown an appreciation for inchoate form, one undoubtedly prefigured by the Neoplatonic notion that man, himself, was protean in nature and by definition, a work in progress.3 This idea, that the emergent and even the incomplete could exist as desirable attributes, finds artistic expression early on in Michelangelo's own oeuvre, while the young sculptor was a resident in the Medici household. We know from contemporary sources that Angelo Poliziano, tutor and humanist scholar, had not only provided the burgeoning artist with the subject matter of one of his earliest works, the Battle of the Centaurs, but with it had offered a lesson gleaned from the ancients, that of the merits of a less than diligent level of finish.4 This work, to which we shall soon return, embodied the notion that a high degree of polish was not always a desirable trait and that process was, in effect, an end in itself.5 However, should the emergent forms and visibly chiseled surface of the Battle of the Centaurs suggest an early and ineluctable predilection on the part of the young master for the aesthetics of roughly hewn marble, we must also consider Condivi's account of the sculptor's life in which Michelangelo expressed his disapproval over one of his most illustrious predecessors, Donatello, whose works, he insisted, seemed admirable when viewed as a distance, but because they were not highly polished, lost their reputation when seen from up close.6 But despite Michelangelo's stated preference for works that had achieved an unequivocal state of resolution, he himself would be plagued throughout his life by an inability to finish and tormented by the schism he perceived between the realization of his concetto and the notion of art as continuing process. While the artist's struggle to bring a work to completion is more readily apparent...