Some of the sculptor's late figures seem to strain against the marble, limbs half-liberated from a block still rough with chisel marks. Nineteenth-century admirers read these unfinished surfaces as accidents of biography—works abandoned at the artist's death, or interrupted by a difficult commission. A more searching interpretation treats the incompleteness as expressive in its own right. The figures appear to embody the very struggle of form emerging from formless stone, so that the visible labor becomes the subject rather than a flaw to be excused. Whether the artist intended this effect or later viewers supplied it remains disputed; what is clear is that the roughness now reads as meaning, not merely as absence, and no restoration would dare to smooth it away.