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In early 1505, at twenty-nine years of age, Michelangelo began work on a massive tomb for Pope Julius II. The formal, temporal, and constructional intertwinings of this project are plumbed to create the foundation of this text. Finding its only full manifestation in the narratives of Vasari and Condivi, this tomb was the site of Michelangelo's first engagement with the making of architecture. The execution of this project would go on to intermittently occupy nearly half of Michelangelo's lifetime, making it a pivotal and paradigmatic work in the understanding of his opera. Explored as an embodied architectural treatise, the tomb reveals Michelangelo's dynamic process of creative making. Problematic issues in the prevailing Twentieth Century analyses and reconstructions of the tomb are called into question and alternative approaches to establish a deeper understanding of the project are proposed. Conjectures on the relevance of history, the hegemony and limits of analysis, the physical manifestation of ideas, what it means to "finish" a project, and what constitutes a "work," are projected from the foundations of the tomb onto the making of architecture today.