The Life of Michelangelo, Part II — The Abdication

La Vie de Michel-Ange — Partie II : L’Abdication

I’ me la morte, in te la vita mia.

Then, in that devastated heart, after renunciation had been accomplished of all that gave it life, a new life arose, a springtime flowered again, love burned with a clearer flame. But this love had almost nothing left of the selfish or the sensual. It was the mystical adoration for the beauty of a Cavalieri. It was the religious friendship of Vittoria Colonna, — the impassioned communion of two souls in God. It was, finally, the paternal tenderness for his orphaned nephews, the pity for the poor and the weak, holy charity.

Michelangelo’s love for Tommaso dei Cavalieri is well made to disconcert the average run of minds, — honest or dishonest. — Even in Italy at the end of the Renaissance, it risked provoking unfortunate interpretations; Aretino made outrageous allusions to it. But the insults of the Aretinos — (there are always such) — cannot reach a Michelangelo. “They fashion in their heart a Michel-agniolo of the stuff that their own heart is made of.”

No soul was ever purer than Michelangelo’s. None had a more religious conception of love.

I have often heard,

said Condivi,

I have often heard Michelangelo speak of love; and those who were present said that he spoke of it no differently than Plato. For my part, I do not know what Plato said about it; but I do know that, after having had for so long and so intimate a converse with him, I never heard issue from his mouth anything but the most honourable utterances, which had the power of extinguishing in young men the disordered desires that stir them.

But this Platonic idealism had nothing literary or cold about it: it was united to a frenzy of thought, which made Michelangelo the prey of all that he saw of the beautiful. He knew this himself, and said one day, refusing an invitation from his friend Giannotti:

When I see a man who possesses some talent or some gift of mind, a man who knows how to do or say something better than the rest of the world, I am compelled to fall in love with him, and then I give myself to him so completely that I no longer belong to myself… You are all so well endowed that if I accepted your invitation, I should lose my liberty; each one of you would steal a piece of me. Even down to the dancer and the lutenist, if they were eminent in their art, who would make of me what they pleased! Instead of being rested, fortified, restored by your company, I should have my soul torn and scattered to all the winds; so that I should no longer know, for many days afterwards, in what world I was moving.

If he was thus conquered by the beauty of thoughts, of words, or of sounds, how much more must he have been by the beauty of the body!

La forza d’un bel viso a che mi sprona!
C’altro non è c’al mondo mi dilecti…

The force of a beautiful face, what a spur it is to me! Nothing in the world is so great a joy to me.

For this great creator of admirable forms, who was at the same time a great believer, a beautiful body was divine, — a beautiful body was God himself appearing under the veil of the flesh. Like Moses before the Burning Bush, he approached it only trembling. The object of his adoration was truly for him an Idol, as he himself put it. He prostrated himself at its feet; and this voluntary humiliation of the great man, which was painful even to the noble Cavalieri himself, was the more strange in that often the idol with the beautiful face had a vulgar and contemptible soul, like Febo di Poggio. But Michelangelo saw nothing of this… Did he really see nothing? — He did not wish to see anything; he finished in his heart the statue scarcely begun.

The earliest of these ideal lovers, of these living dreams, was Gherardo Perini, around 1522. Michelangelo became enamoured later of Febo di Poggio, in 1533, and of Cecchino dei Bracci, in 1544. His friendship for Cavalieri was therefore not exclusive and unique; but it was lasting, and it reached a degree of exaltation that was legitimised, in a certain measure, not only by the beauty, but by the moral nobility of the friend.

Above all the others, without comparison, he loved

says Vasari,

Tommaso dei Cavalieri, a Roman gentleman, young and passionate for art; he made his portrait on a cartoon, life-size, — the only portrait he ever drew; for he had a horror of copying a living person, unless that person were of incomparable beauty.

Varchi adds:

When I saw messer Tommaso Cavalieri at Rome, he had not only incomparable beauty, but such grace of manner, so distinguished a mind, and so noble a bearing, that he well deserved to be loved, the more so the better one knew him.

Michelangelo met him at Rome, in the autumn of 1532. The first letter, by which Cavalieri replied to Michelangelo’s burning declarations, is full of dignity:

I have received a letter from you, which has been the more dear to me as it was unexpected; I say unexpected, because I do not judge myself worthy that a man such as you should write to me. As to what has been said to you in my praise, and as to these works of mine, for which you assure me you have felt no small sympathy, I answer that they were not of a nature to give occasion to a man of genius such as yours, and such that there exists not — I do not say his like, but his second on earth — to write to a young man who is scarcely beginning and who is so ignorant. Yet I cannot believe that you are lying. I believe, yes, I am certain that the affection you bear me has no other cause than the love which a man like you, who is the personification of art, must of necessity have for those who devote themselves to art and who love it. Of such am I, and as to loving art, I yield to no one. I return you well your affection, I promise you: never have I loved a man more than you, never have I desired a friendship more than yours… I pray you to make use of me, on occasion, and I commend myself eternally to you.

Yours wholly devoted, Thomao Cavaliere.

Cavalieri seems to have always kept this tone of respectful and reserved affection. He remained faithful to Michelangelo to his last hour, at which he was present. He preserved his confidence; he was the only one who passed for having any influence over him, and he had the rare merit of always using it for the good and the greatness of his friend. It was he who decided Michelangelo to finish the wooden model of the cupola of Saint Peter’s. It was he who preserved for us Michelangelo’s plans for the construction of the Capitol, and who worked to realise them. It was he, finally, who, after Michelangelo’s death, watched over the execution of his wishes.

But Michelangelo’s friendship for him was like a madness of love. He wrote him delirious letters. He addressed himself to his idol, his forehead in the dust. He calls him “a mighty genius,… a miracle,… the light of our century”; he begs him “not to despise him because he cannot compare with him, to whom no one is equal.” He makes him a gift of all his present, of all his future; and he adds:

It is an infinite grief to me not to be able to give you my past as well, in order that I might serve you longer; for the future will be short: I am too old… I do not believe that anything can destroy our friendship, although I speak in a very presumptuous fashion; for I am infinitely beneath you… I could as easily forget your name as the food on which I live; yes, I could sooner forget the food on which I live, and which only sustains the body, without pleasure, than your name, which nourishes both body and soul, and fills them with such sweetness that, as long as I think of you, I feel neither suffering nor fear of death. — My soul is in the hands of him to whom I have given it… If I had to cease thinking of him, I believe I should fall dead on the spot.

He made Cavalieri superb presents:

Astonishing drawings, marvellous heads in red and black chalk, which he had made with the intention of teaching him to draw. Then he drew for him a Ganymede borne to heaven by the eagle of Zeus, a Tityus with the vulture feeding on his heart, the Fall of Phaëthon into the Po, with the Sun’s chariot, and a Bacchanal of children: all works of the rarest beauty and of an unimaginable perfection.

He also sent him sonnets, at times admirable, often obscure, some of which were soon recited in literary circles and known throughout Italy. The following sonnet has been called “the most beautiful lyric poetry of sixteenth-century Italy”:

With your beautiful eyes I see a sweet light, which I can no longer see with my own blind eyes. Your feet help me to bear a burden which my crippled feet can no longer sustain. By your spirit, towards heaven I feel myself raised up. In your will is all my will. My thoughts take form in your heart, and my words in your breath. Abandoned to myself, I am like the moon, which can be seen in heaven only insofar as the sun illuminates it.

More famous still is this other sonnet, one of the most beautiful chants ever written in honour of perfect friendship:

If a chaste love, if a higher piety, if an equal fortune exists between two lovers, if the cruel fate which strikes one strikes the other also, if a single spirit, if a single will governs two hearts, if a soul in two bodies has made itself eternal, bearing both up to heaven on the same wings, if love at a single blow, with its golden arrow, pierces and burns the entrails of both at once, if one loves the other and neither loves himself, if both place their pleasure and their joy in aspiring to the same end together, if a thousand and a thousand loves would not be the hundredth part of the love, of the faith that binds them, can a stirring of resentment ever break and undo such a tie?

This self-forgetfulness, this ardent gift of his whole being which is melted into the beloved being, did not always have this serenity. Sadness gained the upper hand again; and the soul, possessed by love, struggled in groaning.

I weep, I burn, I am consumed, and my heart feeds on its pain…

I’ piango, i’ ardo, i’ mi consumo, e ‘l core
Di questo si nutriscie…

Thou who hast taken from me the joy of living,

he says elsewhere to Cavalieri.

To these too passionate verses, “the sweet beloved lord,” Cavalieri opposed his affectionate and tranquil coolness. The exaggeration of this friendship shocked him, in secret. Michelangelo excused himself for it:

My dear lord, be not angered by my love, which is addressed only to what is best in thee; for the spirit of the one must fall in love with the spirit of the other. What I desire, what I learn in thy fair face, cannot be understood of common men. Whoever would understand it must first die.

And certainly, this passion for beauty had in it nothing but what was honest. But the sphinx of this love, burning and troubled, and chaste despite all, did not cease to be disquieting and hallucinated.

To these morbid friendships, — a desperate effort to deny the nothingness of his life and to create the love of which he was starved, — there succeeded fortunately the serene affection of a woman who knew how to understand this old child, alone, lost in the world, and brought back into his wounded soul a little peace, a little confidence, a little reason, and the melancholy acceptance of life and of death.

⁂

It was in 1533 and 1534 that Michelangelo’s friendship for Cavalieri had reached its paroxysm. In 1535, he began to know Vittoria Colonna.

She had been born in 1492. Her father was Fabrizio Colonna, lord of Paliano, prince of Tagliacozzo. Her mother, Agnese da Montefeltro, was the daughter of the great Federigo, prince of Urbino. Her race was one of the noblest in Italy, one of those in which the luminous spirit of the Renaissance had been most thoroughly incarnated. At seventeen, she married the marquis of Pescara, Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, a great general, — the victor of Pavia. — She loved him; he did not love her. She was not beautiful. The medals one knows of her show a virile, wilful, somewhat hard face: high forehead, long straight nose, short and morose upper lip, lower lip slightly protruding, tight mouth, prominent chin. Filonico Alicarnasseo, who knew her and wrote her life, lets it be understood, despite all the consideration of his expressions, that she was ugly: “When she was married to the marquis of Pescara, he says, she applied herself to developing the gifts of her mind; for, as she did not possess great beauty, she instructed herself in letters, in order to assure herself that immortal beauty which does not pass away, like the other.” — She was passionately intellectual. In a sonnet, she herself says that “the gross senses, powerless to form the harmony which produces the pure love of noble souls, never awakened in her either pleasure or suffering… A clear flame, she adds, raised my heart so high that low thoughts offend it.” — In nothing was she made to be loved by the brilliant and sensual Pescara; but, as the unreason of love would have it, she was made to love him and to suffer for him.

She did suffer cruelly, indeed, from the infidelities of her husband, who deceived her in her own house, in full sight and knowledge of all Naples. Yet, when he died in 1525, she did not console herself for it. She took refuge in religion and in poetry. She led a cloistered life at Rome, then at Naples, without at first renouncing the thoughts of the world: she sought solitude only that she might absorb herself in the memory of her love, which she sang in her verses. She was in relations with all the great writers of Italy, with Sadoleto, Bembo, Castiglione, who entrusted her with the manuscript of his Cortegiano, with Ariosto, who celebrated her in his Orlando, with Paolo Giovio, Bernardo Tasso, Lodovico Dolce. From 1530, her sonnets spread throughout Italy and won her a glory unique among the women of her time. Withdrawn to Ischia, she sang, without wearying, her transfigured love, in the solitude of the beautiful island, in the midst of the harmonious sea.

But beginning in 1534, religion took possession of her entirely. The spirit of Catholic reform, the free religious spirit which then tended to regenerate the Church while avoiding schism, took hold of her. We do not know whether she came to know Juan de Valdés at Naples; but she was overwhelmed by the preachings of Bernardino Ochino of Siena; she was the friend of Pietro Carnesecchi, of Giberti, of Sadoleto, of the noble Reginald Pole, and of the greatest of those reforming prelates, who constituted in 1536 the Collegium de emendandâ Ecclesiâ: the cardinal Gaspare Contarini, who strove in vain to establish unity with the Protestants at the diet of Ratisbon, and who dared to write these strong words:

The law of Christ is a law of liberty… One cannot call government that whose rule is the will of one man, inclined by nature to evil and driven by innumerable passions. No! All sovereignty is a sovereignty of reason. Its object is to lead by just paths all those who are subject to it, to their just end: happiness. The authority of the pope is also an authority of reason. A pope must know that it is over free men that he exercises this authority. He must not, at his pleasure, command, or forbid, or dispense, but only according to the rules of reason, of the divine Commandments, and of Love: — a rule which brings everything back to God and to the common good.

Vittoria was one of the most exalted souls of that small idealist group, in which the purest consciences of Italy were united. She corresponded with Renée of Ferrara and with Marguerite of Navarre; and Pier Paolo Vergerio, later a Protestant, called her “one of the lights of truth.” — But when the counter-reform movement began, led by the implacable Carafa, she fell into a deadly doubt. She was, like Michelangelo, a soul passionate but weak: she needed to believe, she was incapable of resisting the authority of the Church. “She made herself suffer with fasts, with hair shirts, until she had nothing left but skin on her bones.” Her friend, the cardinal Pole, gave her peace again by obliging her to submit, to humble the pride of her intelligence, to forget herself in God. She did so with a drunkenness of sacrifice… If only she had sacrificed only herself! But she sacrificed her friends with her, she disowned Ochino, whose writings she delivered to the Inquisition of Rome; like Michelangelo, that great soul was broken by fear. She drowned her remorse in a desperate mysticism:

You have seen the chaos of ignorance in which I was, and the labyrinth of errors in which I went, the body perpetually in motion to find rest, the soul ever stirred to find peace. God willed that it should be said to me: Fiat lux! and that it should be shown to me that I was nothing, and that all was in Christ.

She called for death, as a deliverance. — She died, on 25 February 1547.

⁂

It was at the time when she was most penetrated by the free mysticism of Valdés and Ochino that she made the acquaintance of Michelangelo. This woman, sad and tormented, who always needed a guide upon whom to lean, no less needed a being weaker and more unhappy than herself, upon whom to spend all the maternal love with which her heart was full. She applied herself to hiding her trouble from Michelangelo. Serene in appearance, reserved, a little cold, she transmitted to him the peace which she herself asked of others. Their friendship, sketched out around 1535, became intimate from the autumn of 1538, and was wholly built in God. Vittoria was forty-six; he was sixty-three. She lived at Rome, in the cloister of San Silvestro in Capite, beneath the Monte Pincio. Michelangelo lived near Monte Cavallo. They met on Sundays in the church of San Silvestro on the Monte Cavallo. The friar Ambrogio Caterino Politi read them the epistles of Saint Paul, which they discussed together. The Portuguese painter Francisco de Hollanda has preserved for us the memory of these conversations in his four Dialogues on Painting. They are the living picture of this grave and tender friendship.

The first time Francisco de Hollanda went to the church of San Silvestro, he found there the marchioness of Pescara, with some friends, listening to the pious reading. Michelangelo was not there. When the Epistle was over, the gracious lady said, smiling, to the stranger:

— Francisco de Hollanda would have heard, no doubt, a discourse of Michelangelo with more pleasure than this preaching.

To which Francisco, foolishly offended, replied:

— What, madam, does it then seem to Your Excellency that I have a sense for nothing else and that I am good only for painting?

— Do not be so touchy, messer Francesco, — said Lattanzio Tolomei, — the marchioness is rightly convinced that a painter is good for everything. So highly do we esteem painting, we Italians! But perhaps she said that to add to the pleasure you have had, the pleasure of hearing Michelangelo.

Francisco then poured out apologies, and the marchioness said to one of her servants:

— Go to Michelangelo, and tell him that messer Lattanzio and I have stayed, after the end of the service, in this chapel, where it is pleasantly cool; if he will lose a little of his time, it will be a great profit for us… But, — she added, knowing Michelangelo’s wildness, — do not tell him that Francisco de Hollanda, the Spaniard, is here.

While waiting for the messenger’s return, they remained chatting, seeking by what means they should bring Michelangelo to speak of painting without his perceiving their intention; for if he noticed it, he would refuse at once to continue the conversation.

There was a brief moment of silence. There was a knock at the door. We all expressed the fear that the master would not come, since the reply was so prompt. But my star willed that Michelangelo, who lived nearby, was just on his way in the direction of San Silvestro; he was going by the via Esquilina, towards the Baths, philosophising with his disciple Urbino. And as our messenger had met him and brought him back, it was he himself who stood in person on the threshold. The marchioness rose, and remained for a long time in conversation with him, standing, apart from the others, before she invited him to take a seat between Lattanzio and herself.

Francisco de Hollanda sat down beside him; but Michelangelo paid no attention to his neighbour, — which piqued the latter sharply: Francisco said, with a vexed air:

Truly, the surest way of not being seen by anyone is to place oneself directly opposite his eyes.

Michelangelo, astonished, looked at him, and at once apologised, with great courtesy:

— Forgive me, messer Francesco; in truth, I had not noticed you, because I had eyes only for the marchioness.

Yet Vittoria, after a brief pause, began, with an art that could not be too much praised, to speak of a thousand things, in a deft and discreet way, without touching upon painting. One would have said someone besieging a strong city, painfully and with art; and Michelangelo had the air of a vigilant and wary besieged, who sets posts here, who raises the bridges there, who places mines elsewhere, and who keeps the garrison on the alert at the gates and on the walls. But at last, the marchioness prevailed. And truly, no one could have defended himself against her.

— Come, — said she, — one must indeed recognise that one is always defeated when one attacks Michelangelo with his own weapons, that is to say with cunning. We shall have to, messer Lattanzio, talk to him about lawsuits, about papal briefs, or… about painting, if we want to reduce him to silence, and have the last word.

This ingenious detour brings the conversation onto the ground of art. Vittoria speaks to Michelangelo of a pious building she has the project of raising; and at once Michelangelo offers to examine the site, in order to sketch a plan.

— I should not have dared to ask of you so great a service, — replies the marchioness, — although I know that you follow in everything the teaching of the Saviour, who lowered the proud and raised the humble… So those who know you esteem the person of Michelangelo even more than his works, whereas those who do not know you personally celebrate the weakest part of yourself, that is to say the works of your hands. But I praise no less that you withdraw so often into solitude, fleeing our useless conversations, and that, instead of painting all the princes who come to beg you for it, you should have devoted almost all your life to one great work.

Michelangelo modestly declines these compliments, and expresses his aversion for chatterers and idlers, — great lords or popes, — who think themselves permitted to impose their society on an artist, when already his life is not long enough for accomplishing his task.

Then, the conversation passes to the highest subjects of art, which the marchioness treats with a religious gravity. A work of art, for her, as for Michelangelo, is an act of faith.

— Good painting, — says Michelangelo, — approaches God and unites itself to him… It is only a copy of his perfections, a shadow of his brush, his music, his melody… So it is not enough for the painter to be a great and skilful master. I think rather that his life must be pure and holy, as much as possible, so that the Holy Spirit may govern his thoughts…

Thus the day passes, in these truly sacred conversations, of a majestic serenity, in the setting of the church of San Silvestro, unless the friends prefer to continue the conversation in the garden, which Francisco de Hollanda describes for us, “near the fountain, in the shade of the laurel bushes, seated on a stone bench backed against a wall all carpeted with ivy,” whence they overlooked Rome, unrolling at their feet.

These beautiful conversations did not, unfortunately, last. The religious crisis through which the marchioness of Pescara was passing broke them off abruptly. In 1541, she left Rome to shut herself up in a convent, at Orvieto, then at Viterbo.

But often she would set out from Viterbo, and would come to Rome solely to see Michelangelo. He was enamoured of her divine spirit, and she returned it well. He received from her, and kept, many letters, full of a chaste and very sweet love, and such as that noble soul could write.

At her desire, adds Condivi, he executed a naked Christ who, detached from the cross, would fall like an inert corpse at the feet of his holy mother, if two angels did not support him by the arms. She is seated beneath the cross; her face weeps and suffers; and, both arms open, she raises her hands to heaven. On the wood of the cross are read these words: Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa. — Out of love for Vittoria, Michelangelo also drew Jesus Christ on the cross, not dead, as he is usually represented, but living, his face turned towards his Father, and crying: “Eli! Eli!” The body does not abandon itself, without will; it twists and tenses itself in the last sufferings of agony.

Perhaps Vittoria also inspired the two sublime drawings of the Resurrection, which are in the Louvre and at the British Museum. — In the one at the Louvre, the Herculean Christ has cast aside with fury the heavy slab of the tomb; he still has one leg in the grave, and, his head raised, his arms raised, he hurls himself towards heaven, in an upsurge of passion which recalls one of the Captives of the Louvre. To return to God! To leave this world, these men whom he does not even look at, and who crawl at his feet, stupid, terrified! To tear himself from the disgust of this life, at last, at last!… — The drawing at the British Museum has more serenity. The Christ has come out of the tomb: he soars, his vigorous body floats in the air that caresses him; his arms crossed, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, in ecstasy, he rises into the light, like a ray of sun.

Thus Vittoria reopened to Michelangelo’s art the world of faith. She did still more: she gave wing to his poetic genius, which the love of Cavalieri had awakened. Not only did she enlighten him on the religious revelations of which he had an obscure presentiment; but, as Thode has shown, she gave him the example of singing them in his verses. It was in the first time of their friendship that Vittoria’s first Spiritual Sonnets appeared. She sent them to her friend, as she wrote them.

He drew from them a consoling sweetness, a new life. A beautiful sonnet, which he addressed to her in reply, bears witness to his tender gratitude:

Blessed spirit who, by an ardent love, dost keep alive my old heart, near to dying, and who, among thy goods and thy pleasures, dost distinguish me alone amid so many nobler beings, — such as thou didst appear formerly to my eyes, such now to my soul thou showest thyself, to console me… Therefore, receiving this benefit from thee who dost think of me in my cares, I write to thank thee. For it would be great presumption and great shame, if I claimed to give thee miserable paintings in exchange for thy creations beautiful and living.

In the summer of 1544, Vittoria came back to live at Rome, at the cloister of Santa Anna, and she remained there until her death. Michelangelo would go to see her. She thought of him affectionately, she sought to put a little pleasantness and comfort into his life, to make him in secret some little gifts. But the touchy old man, “who would accept presents from no one,” even from those he loved most, refused to grant her that pleasure.

She died. He saw her die, and he said this touching word, which shows what chaste reserve their great love had kept:

“Nothing grieves me so much as to think that I saw her dead, and that I did not kiss her brow and her face, as I kissed her hand.”

“This death, — says Condivi, — left him for a long time wholly stupefied: he seemed to have lost his senses.”

“She bore me very great affection, he said sadly later, and I likewise to her. (Mi voleva grandissimo bene, e io non meno a lei.) Death has taken from me a great friend.”

He wrote on her death two sonnets. The one, all imbued with the Platonic spirit, is of a rough preciosity, of a hallucinated idealism; it seems a night furrowed by lightning. Michelangelo compares Vittoria to the hammer of the divine sculptor, which strikes from matter the sublime thoughts:

If my rough hammer shapes the hard rocks now to one image and now to another, it is from the hand that holds it, guides it and directs it, that it receives its movement; it goes, driven by an alien force. But the divine hammer which in heaven raises itself, creates its own beauty and the beauty of others by its own unique strength. No other hammer can create itself without a hammer; that one alone makes all the others live. And because the blow it strikes upon the anvil is so much the stronger as the hammer rises the higher in the forge, that one has risen above me, even to heaven. That is why it will lead my work to a good end, if the divine forge now lends it its aid. Hitherto, on earth, it was alone.

The other sonnet is more tender, and proclaims the victory of love over death:

When she who drew from me so many sighs withdrew from the world, from my eyes, from herself, Nature, who had judged us worthy of her, fell into shame, and all those who saw her, into tears. — But let death not boast today of having extinguished this sun of suns, as it has done with the others! For Love has conquered, and brings her back to life on earth and in heaven, among the saints. Iniquitous and criminal death thought to stifle the echo of her virtues and to tarnish the beauty of her soul. Her writings have done the opposite: they illuminate her with more life than she had in life; and through death, she has won heaven, which she did not yet possess.

⁂

It was during this grave and serene friendship that Michelangelo executed his last great works of painting and sculpture: the Last Judgement, the frescoes of the Pauline Chapel, and — at last — the Tomb of Julius II.

When Michelangelo had left Florence, in 1534, to settle in Rome, he thought, delivered of all his other labours by the death of Clement VII, to be able to finish in peace the tomb of Julius II, then to die, his conscience discharged of the burden that had weighed upon all his life. But, scarcely arrived, he let himself be put back into chains by new masters.

Paul III had him summoned and begged him to serve him… Michelangelo refused, saying that he could not; for he was bound by contract with the duke of Urbino, until the tomb of Julius was finished. Then the pope grew angry and said: “For thirty years I have had this desire; and now that I am pope, I shall not be able to satisfy it? I shall tear up the contract, and I want you to serve me, in spite of everything.”

Michelangelo was on the point of fleeing.

He thought of taking refuge near Genoa, in an abbey of the bishop of Aleria, who was his friend, and who had been the friend of Julius II: he would have conveniently finished his work there, in the neighbourhood of Carrara. The idea also came to him of retiring to Urbino, which was a peaceful place, and where he hoped to be well regarded, in memory of Julius II: he had already sent thither, with that intention, one of his men to buy a house.

But, at the moment of deciding, will failed him, as always; he feared the consequences of his acts, he flattered himself with the eternal illusion, eternally disappointed, that he could get out of it by some compromise. He let himself once more be tied, and he continued to drag his ball and chain until the end.

On the first of September 1535, a brief from Paul III named him chief architect, sculptor and painter of the Apostolic palace. Since the preceding month of April, Michelangelo had agreed to work upon the Last Judgement. He was entirely occupied with this work, from April 1536 to November 1541, that is to say during Vittoria’s sojourn at Rome. In the course of this enormous task, — doubtless in 1539, — the old man fell from the scaffolding, and injured his leg grievously. “From pain and anger, he would not be tended by any doctor.” He detested doctors, and showed in his letters a comic anxiety when he learned that one of his family had had the imprudence to entrust himself to their care.

Fortunately for him, after his fall, master Baccio Rontini of Florence, his friend, who was a doctor of great wit and who was much attached to him, had pity on him, and went one day to knock at the door of his house. As no one answered, he went up, and searched from room to room, until he came to the one in which Michelangelo was lying. The latter was in despair when he saw him. But Baccio would not leave, and did not depart until he had cured him.

As Julius II once had, Paul III came to watch Michelangelo paint, and gave his opinion. He was accompanied by his master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena. One day, he asked the latter what he thought of the work. Biagio, who was, says Vasari, a very scrupulous person, declared that it was supremely unseemly to have represented in so solemn a place so many indecent nudities; that was, he added, a painting fit to decorate a bath-house or an inn. Michelangelo, indignant, portrayed Biagio from memory after he had gone out; he represented him in Hell, in the form of Minos, with a great serpent coiled about his legs, in the midst of a mountain of devils. Biagio complained to the pope. Paul III mocked him: “If at least, he said to him, Michelangelo had put you in Purgatory, I could have done something to save you; but he has placed you in Hell; and there, I can do nothing: in Hell there is no redemption.”

Biagio was not the only one to find Michelangelo’s paintings indecent. Italy was becoming prudish; and the time was not far off when Veronese would be summoned before the Inquisition for the unseemliness of his Supper at Simon’s. There was no lack of people to cry scandal in front of the Last Judgement. The one who cried the loudest was Aretino. The master pornographer undertook to give lessons in decency to the chaste Michelangelo. He wrote him a letter of an impudent Tartuffe. He accused him of representing “things to make a brothel blush,” and he denounced him for impiety to the rising Inquisition; “for it would be a lesser crime not to believe, he said, than to make such an attempt upon the faith of others.” He urged the pope to destroy the fresco. He mingled with his denunciations of Lutheranism vile insinuations against Michelangelo’s morals; and, to crown it, he accused him of having robbed Julius II. To this infamous letter of blackmail, in which all that was deepest in Michelangelo’s soul: — his piety, his friendship, his sense of honour, — was sullied and outraged, — to this letter, which Michelangelo could not read without laughing in contempt and weeping for shame, he replied nothing. Doubtless he thought of it what he said of certain enemies, in his crushing disdain: “that it was not worth the trouble to fight them; for the victory over them has no importance.” — And when the ideas of Aretino and of Biagio on his Last Judgement had gained ground, he did nothing to reply, nothing to stop them. He said nothing when his work was treated as “Lutheran filth.” He said nothing when Paul IV wished to tear down the fresco. He said nothing when, by order of the pope, Daniele da Volterra “breeched” his heroes. — They asked him his opinion. He replied without anger, with a mixture of irony and pity: “Tell the pope that this is a small thing, which is quite easy to set in order. Let His Holiness only see to setting the world in order: arranging a painting does not take much trouble.” — He knew in what ardent faith he had accomplished this work, amid the religious conversations of Vittoria Colonna, and under the aegis of that immaculate soul. He would have blushed to defend the chaste nudity of his heroic thoughts against the dirty suspicions and innuendoes of hypocrites and base hearts.

When the fresco of the Sistine was finished, Michelangelo thought at last that he had the right to complete the monument of Julius II. But the insatiable pope demanded that the old man of seventy paint the frescoes of the Pauline Chapel. It was barely avoided that he should lay hands on some of the statues destined for the tomb of Julius II, in order to make them serve to ornament his own chapel. Michelangelo had to think himself fortunate to be allowed to sign a fifth and last contract with the heirs of Julius II. By this contract, he delivered up his finished statues, and paid two sculptors to finish the monument: in return for which, he was discharged of all other obligations for ever.

He was not at the end of his troubles. The heirs of Julius II continued to claim from him bitterly the money which they claimed to have been formerly paid out to him. The pope had him told not to think of it, and to give himself entirely to his work at the Pauline Chapel. “But, he replied,

“But, he replied, one paints with the head and not with the hands; whoever does not have his thoughts to himself dishonours himself: that is why I do nothing good, so long as I have these worries… I have been chained to this tomb all my life; I have lost all my youth in trying to justify myself before Leo X and Clement VII; I have been ruined by my too great conscientiousness. So my destiny would have it! I see many people who have set up incomes of 2,000 to 3,000 scudi; and I, after terrible efforts, have only succeeded in being poor. And they call me a thief!… Before men, — (I do not say before God), — I hold myself to be an honest man; I have never deceived anyone… I am not a thief, I am a Florentine citizen, of noble birth, and son of an honourable man… When I have to defend myself against rascals, I go mad, in the end!…

To buy off his adversaries, he finished with his own hand the statues of the Active Life and of the Contemplative Life, although he was not bound to do so by his contract.

At last, the monument of Julius II was inaugurated at San Pietro in Vincoli, in January 1545. What remained of the beautiful original plan? — Only the Moses, which became its centre, after having been formerly only a detail of it. A caricature of a great project!

At least, it was finished. Michelangelo was delivered from the nightmare of his whole life.

Poesies, LIX.
Michelangelo’s great-nephew, in his first edition of the Rime, in 1623, did not dare to publish exactly the poems to Tommaso dei Cavalieri. He let it be believed that they were addressed to a woman. Until the recent works of Scheffler and Symonds, Cavalieri passed for an assumed name, covering Vittoria Colonna.
Letter from Michelangelo to an unknown person (October 1542). Letters, Milanesi edition, CDXXXV.
Donato Giannotti: Dialogi, 1545.
Poesies, CXXXXI.
Gherardo Perini was specially aimed at by the attacks of Aretino. Frey has published some very tender letters of his, from 1522: ”… che avendo di voi lettera, mi paia chon esso voi essere, che altro desiderio non o.” (”… When I have a letter from you, it seems to me that I am with you: which is my only desire.”) He signs: “vostro come figliuolo.” (“Yours as a son.”) — A beautiful poem of Michelangelo on the pain of absence and forgetting seems to be addressed to him:

“Very near here, my love took from me my heart and my life. Here, his beautiful eyes promised me their aid, and then withdrew it from me. Here he bound me, here he loosed me. Here I wept, and, with infinite grief, I saw depart from this stone the one who took me from myself, and who would have no more of me.”

See in the Annexes, XII. — Poesies, XXXV.
Henry Thode, who, in his work on Michelangelo und das Ende der Renaissance, does not resist the desire to construct his hero in the most beautiful fashion, sometimes at the expense of truth, places after the friendship for Gherardo Perini, the friendship for Febo di Poggio, so as to rise, by degrees, up to the friendship for Tommaso dei Cavalieri, because he cannot admit that Michelangelo should have descended from the most perfect love to the affection of a Febo. But, in reality, Michelangelo had already been in relations for more than a year with Cavalieri, when he became enamoured of Febo and when he wrote him the humble letters (of December 1533 according to Thode, or of September 1534 according to Frey) and the absurd and delirious poems in which he plays on the names of Febo and Poggio (Frey, CIII, CIV): — letters and poems to which the little rascal replied with demands for money. (See Frey, edition of the Poesies of Michelangelo, page 526) — As for Cecchino dei Bracci, the friend of his friend Luigi del Riccio, Michelangelo did not know him until more than ten years after Cavalieri. Cecchino was the son of an exiled Florentine, and died prematurely at Rome in 1544. Michelangelo wrote in memory of him forty-eight funerary epigrams, of an idolatrous idealism, if one may say so, and of which some are of a sublime beauty. They are perhaps the darkest poems Michelangelo ever wrote. — (See in the Annexes, XIII)
Benedetto Varchi: Due lezzioni. 1549.
Letter from Tommaso dei Cavalieri to Michelangelo (first of January 1533).
See above all the reply that Michelangelo made to Cavalieri’s first letter, the very day on which he received it (first of January 1533). Of this letter we have three feverish drafts. In a postscript to one of these drafts, Michelangelo writes: “It would be quite permitted to give the name of the things which a man makes a present of to him who receives them; but out of consideration for propriety, it does not happen in this letter.” — It is clear that the word in question is: love.
Letter from Michelangelo to Cavalieri (first of January 1533).
Draft of a letter from Michelangelo to Cavalieri (28 July 1533).
Letter from Michelangelo to Cavalieri (28 July 1533).
Letter from Michelangelo to Bartolommeo Angiolini.
Letter from Michelangelo to Sebastiano del Piombo.
Vasari.
Varchi commented on two of them in public, and published them in his Due Lezzioni. — Michelangelo made no secret of his love. He spoke of it to Bartolommeo Angiolini, to Sebastiano del Piombo. Such friendships surprised no one. When Cecchino dei Bracci died, Riccio cried out his love and his despair to all: “Ah! my friend Donato! Our Cecchino is dead. All Rome weeps, Michelangelo is making for me the drawing of a monument. Write to me, I pray, the epitaph, and send me a consoling letter: my grief has made me lose my mind. Patience! I live with a thousand and a thousand deaths every hour. O God! How Fortune has changed her countenance!” (Letter to Donato Giannotti. January 1544) — “In my breast, I carried a thousand souls of lovers,” Michelangelo makes Cecchino say in one of his funerary epigrams. (Poesies, Frey edition, LXXIII, 12)
Scheffler.
Poesies, CIX, 19. See in the Annexes, XIV.
Poesies, XLIV. — See in the Annexes, XV.
Poesies, LII. — See also, LXXVI. At the end of the sonnet, Michelangelo plays on the name of Cavalieri:
Resto prigion d’un Cavalier armato.
(I am the prisoner of an armed knight.)
Onde al mio viver lieto, che m’ha tolto… (Poesies, CIX, 18)
Il desiato mie dolce signiore… (Ibid., L)
Un freddo aspetto… (Ibid., CIX, 18)
The exact text says: “That which thou thyself lovest best in thyself.”
See in the Annexes, XVI.
Il foco onesto, che m’arde… (Poesies, L)
La casta voglia, che ‘l cor dentro inflamma… (Ibid., XLIII)
In a sonnet, Michelangelo wishes that his skin could serve to clothe the one he loves. He would wish to be the shoes that bear his snow-white feet. — (See in the Annexes, XVII)
Especially between June and October 1533, when Michelangelo, returned to Florence, was away from Cavalieri.
The beautiful portraits in which she has been claimed to be recognised have no authenticity. — Such is the famous drawing in the Uffizi, in which Michelangelo represented a young woman wearing a helmet. At most, he may have undergone, in making it, the unconscious influence of the memory of Vittoria, idealised and rejuvenated; for the figure in the Uffizi has the regular features of Vittoria and her severe expression. The eye is preoccupied, large, and the gaze hard. The neck is bare, the breasts uncovered. The expression is of a cold and concentrated violence.
Thus an anonymous medal represents her, reproduced in the Carteggio di Vittoria Colonna (published by Ermanno Ferrero and Giuseppe Müller). Such Michelangelo doubtless saw her. Her hair is hidden by a large striped headdress; she wears a severely closed dress, with an opening at the neck.

Another anonymous medal shows her young and idealised. (Reproduced in Müntz: Histoire de l’Art pendant la Renaissance, III, 248, and in l’Œuvre et la Vie de Michel-Ange, published by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.) She has her hair drawn up and tied with a ribbon above the forehead; a curl falls upon the cheek, fine braids upon the nape. The forehead is high and straight; the eye looks with a slightly heavy attention; the long regular nose has a thick nostril; the cheeks are full, the ear large and well-formed; the straight and strong chin is raised; the neck bare, a light veil around it; the breasts bare. The air is indifferent and sulky.

These two medals, made at two ages of life, present as common traits the furrow of nostril and upper lip, slightly sullen; and the small mouth, silent, scornful. The whole of the face denotes a calm without illusions, without joy.

Frey believed, somewhat hazardously, that he could find the image of Vittoria in a strange drawing of Michelangelo, on the reverse of a sonnet: — a beautiful and sad drawing, which Michelangelo, in that case, would not have wished to let anyone see. — She is aged, naked to the waist, the breasts empty and pendulous; the head has not aged, it is straight, pensive and proud; a necklace surrounds the long and thin neck; the hair, drawn up, is enclosed in a bonnet, fastened beneath the chin, which hides the ears and makes a helmet. Opposite her, an old man’s head, which resembles Michelangelo, looks at her, — for the last time. — She had just died, when he made this drawing. The sonnet that accompanies it is the beautiful poem on the death of Vittoria: “Quand’ el ministro de sospir mie tanti…” — Frey has reproduced the drawing in his edition of the Poesies of Michelangelo, page 385.
She had then for spiritual counsellor Matteo Giberti, bishop of Verona, who was one of the first to attempt the renewal of the Catholic Church. Giberti’s secretary was the poet Francesco Berni.
Juan de Valdés, son of an intimate secretary of Charles V, and settled at Naples in 1534, was there the head of the reform movement. Nobles and great ladies gathered around him. He published numerous writings, the chief of which were the Cento e dieci divine considerazioni (Basel, 1550), and an Aviso sobre las interpretes de la Sagrada Escritura. He believed in justification by faith alone, and subordinated instruction by Scripture to illumination by the Holy Spirit. He died in 1541. He is said to have had at Naples more than three thousand adherents.
Bernardino Ochino, great preacher, and vicar general of the Capuchins in 1539, became the friend of Valdés, who underwent his influence; despite denunciations, he continued his bold sermons at Naples, at Rome, at Venice, supported by the people against the prohibitions of the Church, until 1542, when on the point of being struck as a Lutheran, he fled from Florence to Ferrara, and thence to Geneva, where he passed over to Protestantism. He was an intimate friend of Vittoria Colonna; and, on the point of leaving Italy, he announced his resolution to her in a confidential letter.
Pietro Carnesecchi of Florence, prothonotary of Clement VII, friend and disciple of Valdés, was a first time summoned before the Inquisition in 1546, and burned at Rome in 1567. He had remained in relations with Vittoria Colonna until her death.
Gaspare Contarini, of a great Venetian family, was first ambassador of Venice to Charles V, in the Low Countries, in Germany and in Spain, then to Clement VII, from 1528 to 1530. He was named cardinal by Paul III, in 1533, and legate in 1541 to the diet of Ratisbon. He did not succeed in coming to an understanding with the Protestants, and made himself suspect to the Catholics. He returned discouraged, and died at Bologna, in August 1542. He had composed numerous writings: De immortalitate animae, — Compendium primae philosophiae, and a treatise On Justification, in which he came very close to Protestant ideas on grace.
Cited by Henri Thode.
Giampietro Carafa, bishop of Chieti, founded in 1524 the order of the Theatines, and, beginning in 1528, began at Venice the work of counter-reform which he was to pursue with implacable rigour, as cardinal, then as pope, under the name of Paul IV, from 1555. — In 1540, the order of the Jesuits was authorised; in July 1542, the tribunal of the Inquisition was instituted in Italy, with full powers against heretics; and in 1545, the Council of Trent opened. It was the end of the free Catholicism dreamed of by the Contarinis, the Gibertis and the Poles.
Deposition of Carnesecchi before the Inquisition, in 1566.
Reginald Pole, of the house of York, had had to flee England, where he had come into conflict with Henry VIII; he passed to Venice in 1532, became there the enthusiastic friend of Contarini, was made cardinal by Paul III, and legate of the patrimony of Saint Peter. Of great personal charm and a conciliating mind, he submitted to the counter-reform, and brought back to obedience many of the free spirits of the Contarini group, who were ready to pass over to Protestantism. Vittoria Colonna put herself entirely under his direction, at Viterbo, from 1541 to 1544. — In 1554, Pole returned as legate to England, where he became archbishop of Canterbury, and died in 1558.
Letter from Vittoria Colonna to cardinal Morone (22 December 1543). — See on Vittoria Colonna the work of Alfred de Reumont, and the second volume of Thode’s Michelangelo.
Francisco de Hollanda: Quatre entretiens sur la peinture, held at Rome in 1538–1539, — composed in 1548, — and published by Joachim de Vasconcellos. — French translation in les Arts en Portugal, by comte A. Raczynski, 1846. Paris, Renouard.
First part of the Dialogue on Painting in the City of Rome.
Ibid. Third part. — On the day of this conversation, Ottavio Farnese, nephew of Paul III, was marrying Margaret, widow of Alessandro de’ Medici. On this occasion, a triumphal procession, — twelve chariots in the antique style, — was passing along the Piazza Navona, where the crowd was being crushed. Michelangelo had taken refuge with his friends in the peace of San Silvestro, above the city.
Condivi. — These are not, to tell the truth, the letters we have preserved from Vittoria, which are no doubt noble, but a little cold. — One must remember that of all this correspondence we now possess no more than five letters, from Orvieto and Viterbo, and three letters, from Rome, between 1539 and 1541.
This drawing, as M. A. Grenier has shown, was the first inspiring image of the various Pietàs which Michelangelo sculpted later: that of Florence (1550–1555), the Pietà Rondanini (1563), and the one recently rediscovered at Palestrina (between 1555 and 1560). — Also linked to this conception are sketches at the Oxford Library, and the Entombment of the National Gallery.

See A. Grenier: Une Pietà inconnue de Michel-Ange à Palestrina, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, March 1907. — In this article one will find reproductions of the different Pietàs.
It was then that Michelangelo thought of publishing a collection of his poems. His friends Luigi del Riccio and Donato Giannotti gave him the idea. Up to then, he had attached no great importance to what he wrote. Giannotti busied himself with this publication, around 1545. Michelangelo made a choice among his verses; and his friends recopied them. But the death of Riccio, in 1546, and of Vittoria, in 1547, turned him away from this idea, which seemed to him a last vanity. His poems were not published in his lifetime, except a small number, which appeared in works by Varchi, Giannotti, Vasari, etc. But they circulated from hand to hand. The greatest composers — Arcadelt, Tromboncino, Consilium, Costanzo Festa — set them to music. Varchi read and commented on one of the sonnets, in 1540, before the Academy of Florence. He found in it “the antique purity and fullness of thought of Dante.”

Michelangelo was nourished on Dante. “No one understood him better, said Giannotti, or possessed his work more perfectly.” No one has addressed to him a more magnificent homage than the beautiful sonnet: “Dal ciel discese…” (Poesies, CIX, 37) — He knew no less Petrarch, Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and the classics of Italian poetry. His style was forged from them. But the feeling which gave life to all was his ardent Platonic idealism.
Rime con giunta di XVI Sonetti spirituali, 1539.
Rime con giunta di XXIV Sonetti spirituali e Trionfo della Croce, 1544, Venice.
“I possess a little book in parchment, which she made me a present of, some ten years ago, writes Michelangelo to Fattucci, on 7 March 1551. It contains a hundred and three sonnets, not counting the forty on paper, which she sent me from Viterbo: I had them bound in the same little book… I also have many letters that she wrote to me from Orvieto and Viterbo. That is what I have of hers.”
See in the Annexes, XVIII. (Poesies, LXXXVIII)
Vasari. — He fell out, for a time, with one of his dearest friends, Luigi del Riccio, because the latter made him presents, in spite of him:

“I am more oppressed, he writes to him, by your extreme kindness, than if you robbed me. There must be equality between friends: if one gives more, and the other less, then one comes to blows; and if one is victor, the other does not forgive.”
Condivi.
See in the Annexes, XIX. (Poesies, CI)

Michelangelo adds this comment:

“It (the hammer: Vittoria) was alone in this world to exalt virtue by its great virtues; there was no one here who pushed the forge bellows. Now, in heaven, it will have many helpers; for there is no one there to whom virtue is not dear. So I hope that from on high will come the completion of my being. — Now, in heaven, there will be someone to push the bellows: down here, it had no help at the forge, where virtues are forged.”
See in the Annexes, XX. (Poesies, C)

It is on the reverse of the manuscript of this sonnet that one finds the pen drawing in which the image of Vittoria, with withered breasts, is claimed to be recognised.
Michelangelo’s friendship for Vittoria Colonna was not exclusive of other passions. It did not suffice to fill his soul. People have been careful not to say so, out of a ridiculous concern to “idealise” Michelangelo. As if a Michelangelo needed to be “idealised”! — During the time of his friendship with Vittoria, between 1535 and 1546, Michelangelo loved a woman “beautiful and cruel,” donna aspra e bella (CIX, 89), — lucente e fera stella, iniqua e fella, dolce pieta con dispietato core (CIX, 9), — cruda e fera stella (CIX, 14) — bellezza e gratia equalmente infinita (CIX, 3), — “my lady enemy,” as he calls her again, la donna mia nemica (CIX, 54). — He loved her passionately, he humbled himself before her, he would have almost sacrificed his eternal salvation to her:

Godo gl’ inganni d’una donna bella… (CIX, 90)
Porgo umilinente al’ aspro giogo il collo… (CIX, 54)
Dolce mi saria l’inferno teco… (CIX, 55)

He was tortured by this love. She amused herself with him:

Questa mie donna è si pronta e ardita,
C’ allor che la m’aneide, ogni mie bene
Cogli ochi mi promecte e parte tiene
Il crudel ferro dentro a la ferita… (CIX, 15)

She excited his jealousy, and flirted with others. He came to hate her. He begged fate to make her ugly and in love with him, so that he could no longer love her and could make her suffer in turn:

“Love, why dost thou permit that beauty refuse thy supreme courtesy to him who desires it and esteems thee, and that she grant it to stupid beings? Ah! grant that another time she may be of a loving heart and so ugly of body that I may not love her, and that she may love me!”

See in the Annexes, XXI. (Poesies, CIX, 63)
The idea of this immense fresco, which covers the entrance wall of the Sistine Chapel, above the pope’s altar, went back to Clement VII, as early as 1533.
In July 1573. — Veronese did not fail to lean on the example of the Last Judgement:

“I admit that it is wrong; but I come back to what I said, that it is my duty to follow the examples that my masters have given me.

— What then have your masters done? Such things, perhaps?

— Michelangelo at Rome, in the chapel of the pope, has represented Our Lord, His mother, Saint John, Saint Peter and the Heavenly Court, and he has represented all the figures nude, even the Virgin Mary, and in attitudes that the most severe religion has not inspired…”

(A. Baschet: Paul Véronèse devant le Saint-Office, 1880)
It was a vengeance. He had tried to extort from him, in his usual manner, some works of art; he had had, moreover, the effrontery to outline for him a programme for the Last Judgement. Michelangelo had politely declined this strange offer of collaboration, and turned a deaf ear to the requests for presents. Aretino wanted to show Michelangelo what it could cost to fail to show him deference.
A comedy of Aretino, the Hipocrito, was the prototype of Tartuffe. (P. Gauthiez: l’Arétin, 1895)
He was making an insulting allusion to “Gherardi and Tomai” (Gherardo Perini, and Tommaso dei Cavalieri).
This blackmail spreads itself out shamelessly. At the end of this letter of threats, after having reminded Michelangelo of what he expected of him: — presents, — Aretino adds this postscript:

“Now that I have eased my anger somewhat, and that I have made you see that if you are divino, I am not of acqua, tear up this letter, as I do, and decide…”
By a Florentine, in 1549. (Gaye, Carteggio, II, 500)
In 1596, Clement VIII also wished to have the Judgement effaced.
In 1559. — Daniele da Volterra kept from this operation the nickname of “the breeches-maker” (braghettone). — Daniele was a friend of Michelangelo. Another of his friends, the sculptor Ammanati, condemned the scandal of these nude representations. — Michelangelo was therefore not even supported on this occasion by his disciples.
The inauguration of the Last Judgement took place on 25 December 1541. People came from all over Italy, from France, from Germany and from Flanders, to be present. — See the description of the work in the book of the collection: les Maîtres de l’Art, pages 90–93.
These frescoes (the Conversion of Saint Paul, the Martyrdom of Saint Peter), on which Michelangelo worked from 1542, were interrupted by two illnesses, in 1544 and 1546, and finished with great difficulty in 1549–1550. They were “the last paintings he executed, writes Vasari, and with great effort; for painting, and particularly fresco, is not an art for old men.”
These were to be first the Moses and the two Slaves; but Michelangelo found that the Slaves no longer suited the tomb thus reduced, and he sculpted two other figures: the Active Life and the Contemplative Life (Rachel and Leah).
Letter to an unknown Monsignore (October 1542). (Letters, Milanesi edition, CDXXXV)

Signior mie caro, i’ te sol chiamo e ‘nvoco
Contra l’inutil mie cieco tormento.

His desire would have been, after the death of Vittoria, to return to Florence, to “lay his weary bones, beside his father, in rest.” But after having served, all his life, the popes, he wished to consecrate his last years to serving God. Perhaps he had been pushed to it by his friend, and was accomplishing one of her last wishes. A month before the death of Vittoria Colonna, on the first of January 1547, Michelangelo was indeed named, by brief of Paul III, prefect and architect of Saint Peter’s, with full powers to raise the edifice. He did not accept without difficulty; and it was not the pope’s insistence that decided him to charge his septuagenarian shoulders with the heaviest burden he had yet borne. He saw in it a duty, a mission from God:

“Many believe — and I believe — that I have been placed at this post by God, he wrote. Old as I am, I do not wish to abandon it; for I serve out of love of God, and I place in him all my hopes.”

He accepted no payment for this sacred task.

He found himself there at grips with numerous enemies: “the sect of San Gallo,” as Vasari says, and all the administrators, suppliers, contractors of the construction, whose frauds he denounced, on which San Gallo had always closed his eyes. “Michelangelo, says Vasari, delivered Saint Peter’s from thieves and bandits.”

A coalition formed against him. Its chief was the brazen Nanni di Baccio Bigio, an architect, whom Vasari accuses of having robbed Michelangelo, and who aimed at supplanting him. The rumour was spread that Michelangelo understood nothing of architecture, that he wasted money and was only destroying his predecessor’s work. The Building Committee, itself taking part against its architect, provoked in 1551 a solemn enquiry, presided over by the pope; the inspectors and the workmen came to give evidence against Michelangelo, with the support of the cardinals Salviati and Cervini. Michelangelo scarcely deigned to justify himself: he refused all discussion. — “I am not obliged, he said to cardinal Cervini, to communicate to you, or to anyone else, what I must or wish to do. Your business is to oversee the expenses. The rest concerns only me.” — Never did his intractable pride consent to share his projects with anyone. To his workmen who complained, he answered: “Your business is to lay bricks, to cut stone, to do carpentry, to do your trade, and to carry out my orders. As for knowing what I have in my mind, you will never learn it: for that would be contrary to my dignity.”

Against the hatreds that such proceedings stirred up, he could not have held out for an instant without the favour of the popes. So, when Julius III died, and cardinal Cervini became pope, Michelangelo was on the point of leaving Rome. But Marcellus II only briefly passed across the throne; and Paul IV succeeded him. Once more assured of sovereign protection, Michelangelo continued to struggle. He would have believed himself dishonoured, and would have feared for his salvation, had he abandoned the work.

“Against my will, I have been charged with it, he says. For eight years I have been wearing myself out in vain over it, amid all the annoyances and all the fatigues. Now that the construction is far enough advanced for the cupola to begin to be vaulted, my departure from Rome would be the ruin of the work, a great affront to me, and, for my soul, a very great sin.”

His enemies did not lay down their arms; and the struggle, for a moment, took on a tragic character. In 1563, Michelangelo’s most devoted assistant at Saint Peter’s, Pier Luigi Gaeta, was thrown into prison, on a false accusation of theft; and the chief of the works, Cesare da Casteldurante, was stabbed. Michelangelo answered by appointing Gaeta in Cesare’s place. The Building Committee drove out Gaeta, and named Michelangelo’s enemy, Nanni di Baccio Bigio. Michelangelo, beside himself, came no more to Saint Peter’s. The rumour was spread that he was resigning his functions; and the Committee gave him as deputy Nanni, who at once acted as master. He counted on ending by wearing out the old man of eighty-eight, ill and dying. He did not know his adversary. Michelangelo, on the spot, went to find the pope; he threatened to leave Rome, if justice were not done him. He demanded a new enquiry, convicted Nanni of incompetence and lying, and had him driven out. It was September 1563, four months before his death. — Thus, until the very last hour, he had to struggle against jealousy and against hatred.

Let us not pity him. He knew how to defend himself; and, dying, he was capable, alone, as he said long ago to his brother Giovan Simone, “of cutting to pieces ten thousand of that breed.”

⁂

Apart from the great work of Saint Peter’s, other architectural undertakings occupied the end of his life: the Capitol, the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, the staircase of the Laurenziana of Florence, the Porta Pia, and above all the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, — the last of his great projects, miscarried like the others.

The Florentines had begged him to raise the church of their nation at Rome; duke Cosimo, himself, wrote him a flattering letter on the subject; and Michelangelo, sustained by his love for Florence, undertook the work with a youthful enthusiasm. He said to his compatriots “that if they carried out his plan, neither the Romans nor the Greeks would ever have had anything like it: — words, says Vasari, such as never came out of his mouth, either before or afterwards; for he was extremely modest.” The Florentines accepted the plan, without changing anything in it. A friend of Michelangelo, Tiberio Calcagni, executed, under his direction, a wooden model of the church: — “it was a work of so rare an art that one has never seen a like church, for beauty, richness and variety. They began the construction, they spent 5,000 scudi. Then the money failed, they stopped there, and Michelangelo felt the most violent chagrin at it.” The church was never built, and even the model has disappeared.

Such was the last artistic disappointment of Michelangelo. How could he have had the illusion, in dying, that Saint Peter’s, scarcely begun, would ever be realised, that any of his works would survive him? He himself, had he been free, would perhaps have broken them. The history of his last sculpture, the Deposition from the Cross of the cathedral of Florence, shows to what detachment from art he had come. If he still continued to sculpt, it was no longer from faith in art, but from faith in Christ, and because “his spirit and his strength could not refrain from creating.” But when he had finished his work, he broke it. “He would have destroyed it entirely, had not his servant Antonio begged him to give it to him.”

Such was the indifference that Michelangelo, near death, showed for his works.

⁂

Since the death of Vittoria, no great affection any longer lit up his life. Love had departed:

Fiamma d’amor nel cor non m’ è rimasa;
Se ‘l maggior caccia sempre il minor duolo,
Di penne l’ alm’ ho ben tarpat’ et rasa.

The flame of love has not stayed in my heart. The greater evil [old age] always drives out the lesser: I have clipped the wings of the soul.

He had lost his brothers and his best friends. Luigi del Riccio had died in 1546, Sebastiano del Piombo in 1547; his brother, Giovan Simone, in 1548. He never had great relations with his last brother, Gismondo, who died in 1555. He had transferred his need of family and gruff affection upon his orphaned nephews, upon the children of Buonarroto, his most beloved brother. They were two: a girl, Cecca (Francesca), and a boy, Lionardo. Michelangelo placed Cecca in a convent; he provided her with a trousseau, he paid her pension, he went to see her; and, when she married, he gave her in dowry one of his properties. — He personally took charge of the education of Lionardo, who was nine years old at the death of his father. A long correspondence, which often recalls Beethoven’s with his nephew, bears witness to the seriousness with which he fulfilled his paternal mission. Not without frequent fits of anger. Lionardo often put his uncle’s patience to the test; and this patience was not great. The boy’s bad handwriting was enough to throw Michelangelo off his hinges. He saw in it a lack of regard towards him:

I never receive a letter from you without the fever coming on before I can read it. I don’t know where you learned to write! Little love!… I believe that if you had to write to the greatest ass in the world, you would put more care into it… I have thrown your last letter into the fire, because I could not read it: I cannot therefore reply to it. I have already told you and repeated it ad nauseam that, each time I receive a letter from you, the fever comes on before I manage to read it. Once and for all, do not write to me any more in future. If you have anything to make known to me, find someone who knows how to write; for I have need of my head for something else than to wear myself out deciphering your scrawls.

Distrustful by nature, and made still more suspicious by his disappointments with his brothers, he had few illusions about the humble and fawning affection of his nephew: this affection seemed to him to be addressed above all to his strong-box, of which the little one knew he would inherit. Michelangelo did not refrain from telling him so. Once, being ill and in danger of death, he learned that Lionardo had hastened to Rome and there had made some indiscreet enquiries; he writes to him, furious:

Lionardo! I have been ill, and you have run to Ser Giovan Francesco to see if I was not leaving anything behind. Have you not enough of my money at Florence? You cannot lie to your race and fail to resemble your father, who drove me, in Florence, from my own house! Know that I have made a will of such a kind that you have no more to expect from me. So go with God, and do not appear before my eyes again, and never write to me again!

These fits of anger little moved Lionardo, for they were generally followed by affectionate letters and presents. A year later, he hurried again to Rome, lured by the promise of a present of 3,000 scudi. Michelangelo, wounded by his interested eagerness, writes to him:

You came to Rome with a furious haste. I do not know whether you would have come so quickly if I had been in misery and if I had lacked bread!… You say that it was your duty to come, out of love for me. — Yes! the love of a wood-borer! If you had any love for me, you would have written to me: “Michelangelo, keep the 3,000 scudi, and spend them on yourself: for you have given us so much that it is enough for us; your life is dearer to us than fortune…” — But, for forty years now, you have lived off me; and never have I received from you so much as a kind word…

A grave question was that of Lionardo’s marriage. It occupied the uncle and the nephew for six years. Lionardo, docile, was sparing of the inheriting uncle; he accepted all his observations, let him choose, debate, reject the matches that offered themselves: he seemed indifferent; Michelangelo, on the contrary, grew passionate about it, as if he himself were the one to marry. He regarded marriage as a serious affair, in which love was the least important condition; fortune did not enter much more into the reckoning: what mattered was health and respectability. He gave rough counsels, devoid of poetry, robust and positive:

It is a big decision: remember that between man and woman there must always be a difference of age of ten years; and pay attention that the one you choose be not only good, but healthy… I have been told of several persons: one pleased me, another did not. If you think of it, write to me, in case you have more pleasure in one than in another: I will tell you my opinion… You are free to take the one or the other, provided she is noble and well brought-up, and rather without a dowry than with a big dowry, — in order to live in peace… A Florentine has told me that you have been told of a girl of the Ginori house, and that she pleases you. It does not please me that you should take for wife a girl whom her father would not give you if he had enough to settle a proper dowry on her. I want him who wishes to give you a wife to give her to you, and not to your fortune… You have only to consider the health of soul and body, the quality of blood and morals, and, moreover, who her relations are: for that is of great importance… Take the trouble to find a wife who would not be ashamed to wash the dishes, in case of necessity, and to occupy herself with household matters… As for beauty, since you are not exactly the most handsome young man in Florence, do not worry about it, provided only she is not crippled, or repulsive…

After much searching, it seems they had laid hands on the rare bird. But, at the last moment, here is a redhibitory defect discovered in her;

I learn that she has weak eyesight: which does not seem to me a small defect. So I have promised nothing yet. Since you have not promised anything either, my advice is that you disengage yourself, if you are certain of the matter.

Lionardo grew discouraged. He was astonished at the insistence which his uncle put into wanting to marry him off:

That is true,

replies Michelangelo,

I do desire it: it is good, in order that our race may not end with us. I know well that the world would not be shaken by it; but in the end every animal strives to preserve its species. That is why I desire that you should marry.

At last Michelangelo himself grew tired; he began to find it ridiculous that it should be he who was always occupied with Lionardo’s marriage, and that the latter should appear to take no interest in it. He declared that he would no longer meddle in it:

For sixty years, I have been occupied with your affairs; now I am old, and I must think of my own.

Just at that moment, he learned that his nephew had just become engaged to Cassandra Ridolfi. He rejoices, he congratulates him, and he promises him a dowry of 1,500 ducats. Lionardo marries. Michelangelo sends his wishes to the young couple, and promises a pearl necklace to Cassandra. Joy does not however prevent him from warning his nephew that, “although he does not know much about these things, it seems to him that Lionardo should have settled very exactly all questions of money before bringing the woman into his house: for there is always in these questions a seed of disunion.” He concludes with this jesting recommendation:

“Come now!… And now, try to live; and think of it well, for the number of widows is always greater than that of widowers.”

Two months later, instead of the promised necklace, he sends two rings to Cassandra, — one set with a diamond, the other with a ruby. Cassandra, in thanks, sends him eight shirts. Michelangelo writes:

They are beautiful, especially the linen, and they please me greatly. But I am sorry you have gone to this expense; for I was lacking nothing. Thank Cassandra well for me, and tell her that I am at her disposal to send her whatever I can find here, in the way of Roman articles or others. This time, I have sent only a little thing; another time, we shall do better, with some object that may give her pleasure. Just let me know.

Soon come the children: the first, called Buonarroto, at the wish of Michelangelo, — the second, named Michelangelo, who died shortly after his birth. And the old uncle, who invited the young couple to come to him, at Rome, in 1556, never ceased to take part affectionately in the joys as in the sorrows of the family, but without ever permitting his kin to occupy themselves with his affairs, nor even with his health.

⁂

Apart from his family relations, Michelangelo was not lacking in illustrious or distinguished friendships. Despite his wild humour, it would be quite false to picture him as a Danube peasant, after the fashion of Beethoven. He was an Italian aristocrat, of high culture and fine race. From his adolescence passed in the gardens of San Marco, near Lorenzo the Magnificent, he remained in relations with all that Italy counted of the noblest among her great lords, her princes, her prelates, her writers and her artists. He matched wits with the poet Francesco Berni; he corresponded with Benedetto Varchi; he exchanged poems with Luigi del Riccio and with Donato Giannotti. People sought his conversation, his profound insights into art, his remarks on Dante, whom no one knew as he did. A Roman lady wrote that he was, when he wished, “a gentleman of fine and seductive manners, and such that he had scarcely his like in Europe.” The dialogues of Giannotti and of Francisco de Hollanda show his exquisite politeness and his familiarity with the world. One sees even, by certain of his letters to princes, that it would have been easy for him to be a perfect courtier. The world never fled him: it was he who kept it at a distance; it depended only on him to lead a triumphal life. He was for Italy the incarnation of her genius. At the end of his career, the last survivor of the great Renaissance, he personified it, he was by himself a whole century of glory. It was not only the artists who looked upon him as a supernatural being. Princes bowed before his royalty. Francis I and Catherine de’ Medici paid him homage. Cosimo de’ Medici wanted to name him senator; and, when he came to Rome, he treated him as an equal, made him sit beside him, conversed with him confidentially. Cosimo’s son, don Francesco de’ Medici, received him, his cap in his hand, “showing a respect without bounds for a man so rare.” They honoured no less in him his genius than “his great virtue.” His old age was surrounded by as much glory as that of Goethe or of Hugo. But he was a man of another metal. He had neither the thirst for popularity of the one, nor the bourgeois respect of the other, — free as he was, — for the world and for the established order. He despised glory, he despised the world; and if he served the popes, “it was by constraint.” He did not even hide that “even the popes bored him and angered him sometimes, in conversing with him and sending for him,” and that, “in spite of their orders, he neglected to come, when he was not disposed to it.”

When a man is so made by nature and by education as to hate ceremonies and despise hypocrisy, there is no good sense in not letting him live, as suits him. If he asks nothing of you and does not seek your society, why do you seek his? Why do you want to lower him to those nothings, which are repugnant to his withdrawal from the world? He is not a superior man who thinks of pleasing fools, rather than his own genius.

He had therefore with the world only indispensable relations, or wholly intellectual exchanges. He did not let it have access to his intimacy; and the popes, the princes, men of letters and artists held little place in his life. Even with the small number of those for whom he felt a real sympathy, it was rare that a lasting friendship became established. He loved his friends, he was generous towards them; but his violence, his pride, his suspicions often made of those whom he had most obliged, mortal enemies. He wrote, one day, this beautiful and sad letter:

The poor ingrate is so made, by nature, that if you come to his aid in his distress, he says that he himself advanced to you what you give him. If you give him work to show your interest, he claims that you were forced to entrust this work to him, because you understand nothing of it. All the benefits he receives, he says the benefactor was obliged to confer. And if the benefits received are so evident that it is impossible to deny them, then the ingrate waits long enough for the one from whom he has received good to fall into an obvious fault; then he has a pretext to speak ill of him and to free himself from all gratitude. — Thus people have always acted towards me; and yet not an artist has come to me without my doing him good, and with all my heart. And then they take pretext from my odd humour, or from the madness with which they pretend I am afflicted and which harms only me, to speak ill of me; and they outrage me: — that is the lot of all who are good.

⁂

In his own house, he had assistants who were devoted enough, but in general mediocre. He was suspected of choosing them mediocre on purpose so as to have in them only docile instruments, and not collaborators, — which, moreover, would have been legitimate. But, says Condivi,

it was not true, as many reproached him with, that he did not wish to instruct: on the contrary, he did so willingly. Unfortunately, fate willed that he fell either on subjects of little capacity, or on capable subjects, but ones who were not persevering, who, after a few months of his teaching, already held themselves for masters.

There is no doubt, moreover, that the first quality he demanded of his assistants was an absolute submission. As pitiless as he was to those who affected towards him a cavalier independence, so much had he always for modest and faithful disciples treasures of indulgence and generosity. The lazy Urbano, “who did not want to work,” — and who was quite right; for, when he worked, it was to spoil irremediably by his clumsiness the Christ of the Minerva, — was, during an illness, the object of his paternal care; he called Michelangelo: “dear as the best father.” — Piero di Giannoto was “loved like a son.” — Silvio di Giovanni Cepparello, having left him to enter the service of Andrea Doria, grieves, and begs him to take him back. — The touching story of Antonio Mini is an example of the generosity of Michelangelo towards his assistants. Mini, that one of his disciples who, according to Vasari, “had good will, but was not intelligent,” loved the daughter of a poor widow of Florence. At the desire of his parents, Michelangelo sent him away from Florence. Antonio wanted to go to France. Michelangelo made him a royal gift: “all the drawings, all the cartoons, the painting of the Leda, all the models he had made for it, both in wax and in clay.” Provided with this fortune, Antonio set off. But the bad luck which struck Michelangelo’s projects struck still more harshly those of his humble friend. He went to Paris, to show the picture of the Leda to the king. Francis I was absent; Antonio left the Leda in the keeping of an Italian friend of his, Giuliano Buonaccorsi, and returned to Lyons, where he had settled. When he went back to Paris, a few months later, the Leda had disappeared: Buonaccorsi had sold it, on his own account, to Francis I. Antonio, in despair, without resources, incapable of defending himself, lost in this foreign city, died of grief, at the end of 1533.

But, of all his assistants, the one whom Michelangelo loved best and to whom his affection assured immortality, was Francesco d’Amadore, surnamed Urbino, of Castel Durante. He had been since 1530 in Michelangelo’s service, and he worked under his orders on the tomb of Julius II. Michelangelo was anxious about what would become of him after his death.

“He said to him: “What will you do, if I die?”

“Urbino replied: “I shall serve another.”

”— O unhappy one! said Michelangelo, I want to remedy your misery.”

“And he gave him 2,000 scudi at one stroke: a present such as only emperors and popes can make.”

It was Urbino who died first. The day after his death, Michelangelo wrote to his nephew:

Urbino is dead, yesterday evening, at four o’clock. He has left me so afflicted and so troubled that it would have been sweeter to me to die with him, because of the love I bore him; and he well deserved it: for he was a worthy man, loyal and faithful. His death makes me feel that I no longer live, and I cannot find tranquillity again.

His sorrow was so deep that it grows still more searing, three months later, in a famous letter to Vasari:

Messer Giorgio, my dear friend, it may be that I write badly; nevertheless, in reply to your letter, I will write a few words. You know that Urbino is dead, — which is for me a very cruel pain, but also a very great grace which God has done me. This grace is that he who, living, kept me alive, dying, has taught me to die, not with displeasure, but with the desire for death. I kept him for twenty-six years, and I always found him very sure and very faithful. I had enriched him; and now that I counted on him to be the support of my old age, he is taken from me; and I have no other hope but to see him again in paradise, where God, by the very happy death he has procured for him, has shown well that he was destined to be. What was harder for him than death, was to leave me alive in this deceitful world, and amid so many anxieties. The best part of myself has gone with him, and there remains for me nothing but an infinite misery.

In his distress, he begged his nephew to come and see him at Rome. Lionardo and Cassandra, anxious about his grief, came, and found him very weakened. He drew a new strength from the obligation that Urbino had imposed upon him to take charge of the guardianship of his sons, of whom one was his godson and bore his name.

⁂

He had other friendships, strange ones. By that need for reaction, so strong in robust natures against all the constraints that society imposes, he liked to surround himself with people simple of mind, who had unexpected sallies and free ways: people who were not like everyone else: — a Topolino, a stone-cutter of Carrara, “who imagined himself to be a distinguished sculptor, and who would never let a barge laden with blocks of marble leave for Rome without sending three or four little figures modelled by him, which made Michelangelo die of laughter”; — a Menighella, painter at Valdarno, “who came from time to time to Michelangelo’s, that he might draw him a Saint Roch or a Saint Anthony, which he afterwards coloured and sold to the peasants. And Michelangelo, whom kings had so much trouble obtaining the smallest work from, would drop everything to execute these drawings, on Menighella’s directions, among others, an admirable Crucifix”; — a barber, who dabbled in painting, and for whom he drew the cartoon of a Saint Francis with the stigmata; — one of his Roman workmen, who was working on the tomb of Julius II, and who thought he had become a great sculptor, without having taken notice of it, because by following docilely Michelangelo’s directions, he had brought forth from the marble, to his stupefaction, a beautiful statue; — the facetious goldsmith Piloto, called Lasca; — the do-nothing Indaco, that strange painter, “who loved as much to chatter as he hated to paint,” and who used to say that “always to work without taking pleasure was unworthy of a Christian”; — above all, the ridiculous and harmless Giuliano Bugiardini, for whom Michelangelo had a special sympathy.

Giuliano had a natural goodness, a simple way of living, without malice and without envy, that pleased Michelangelo infinitely. He had no other fault than that of loving his own works too much. But Michelangelo had the habit of esteeming him happy for that; for he himself was very unhappy at not being able to satisfy himself fully with anything… One time, messer Ottaviano de’ Medici had asked Giuliano to make him a portrait of Michelangelo. Giuliano set to work; and, after having held Michelangelo seated for two hours, without speaking, he said to him: “Michelangelo, come and see, get up: the essential of the physiognomy, I have already caught it.” Michelangelo got up; and, when he saw the portrait, he said laughing to Giuliano: “What the devil have you done? You have driven one of my eyes into the temple: look a little.” Giuliano, at these words, was beside himself. He looked several times at the portrait and at his model, alternately; and he answered boldly: “It does not seem so to me; but go back to your place, and I will correct it, if there is need.” — Michelangelo, who knew what was what, took his place again smiling opposite Giuliano, who looked at him repeatedly and at his painting, then rose, and said: “The eye is such as I have drawn it, and nature shows it so.” — “Well then, said Michelangelo laughing, it is a fault of nature. Continue, and do not spare the colour.”

So much indulgence, which was not customary to Michelangelo with other men, and which he lavished on these little people, supposes no less raillery in humour, which is amused by human ridicules, than affectionate pity for these poor fools who thought themselves great artists and who perhaps inspired in him a return upon his own folly. There was in it much melancholy and clownish irony.

Poesies, CXXIII.
Letter from Michelangelo to Vasari. (19 September 1552)
Letter from Michelangelo to Lionardo, his nephew (7 July 1557)
Reference here is to Antonio da San Gallo, chief architect of Saint Peter’s, from 1537 until his death in October 1546. He had always been an enemy of Michelangelo, who treated him without consideration. They were opposed to each other, regarding the fortifications of the Borgo (the Vatican quarter), for which Michelangelo had San Gallo’s plans abandoned in 1545, and at the construction of the Palazzo Farnese, which San Gallo had built up to the second floor, and which Michelangelo finished, imposing in 1549 his model for the cornice and eliminating his rival’s project. — (See Thode’s Michelangelo)
The future pope Marcellus II.
Vasari.
Bottari.
At the end of the 1551 enquiry, Michelangelo, turning to Julius III who was presiding, said to him: “Holy Father, you see what is my gain! If the troubles I endure do not serve my soul, I am wasting my time and my pains.” — The pope who loved him, put his hands on his shoulders, and exclaimed: “You are gaining for both, for your soul and for your body. Have no fear!” (Vasari)
Paul III had died on 10 November 1549; and Julius III, who loved, like him, Michelangelo, reigned from 8 February 1550 to 23 March 1555. Cardinal Cervini was elected, on 9 April 1555, under the name of Marcellus II. He reigned only a few days; and Paul IV Carafa succeeded him, on 23 May 1555.
Letter from Michelangelo to Lionardo. (11 May 1555)

Affected by the criticisms of his own friends, he nevertheless asked, in 1550, “that they might be willing to relieve him of the burden which he had been bearing free of charge, for seventeen years, by order of the popes.” — But his resignation was not accepted, and Pius IV, by a brief, renewed his powers. — It was then that he resolved at last to execute, at the urging of Cavalieri, the wooden model of the cupola. Until then, he had kept all his projects in his head, refusing to let anyone see any of them.
Nanni did not for that matter fail to ask duke Cosimo, on the morrow of Michelangelo’s death, to have him given the succession of Michelangelo at Saint Peter’s.
Michelangelo could only see raised the staircases and the square. The edifices of the Capitol were not finished until the seventeenth century.
Of Michelangelo’s church, nothing remains today. It was entirely rebuilt in the eighteenth century.
Michelangelo’s model was executed in stone, and not in wood, as he wished.
In 1559–1560.
Vasari.

It was in 1553 that he began this work, the most moving of all his works; for it is the most intimate: one feels that he speaks in it only for himself, he suffers, and abandons himself to his suffering. Moreover, he has, it seems, represented himself in the old man with the sorrowful face, who supports the body of Christ.
In 1555.
Tiberio Calcagni bought it back from Antonio, and asked Michelangelo’s permission to repair it. Michelangelo consented to this, Calcagni reassembled the group; but he died, and the work remained unfinished.
Poesies, LXXXI (around 1550).

However, some poems, which seem to date from his extreme old age, show that the flame was not as extinguished as he believed, and that “the old burnt wood,” as he said, sometimes caught fire again. — (See in the Annexes, XXII. — Poesies, CX and CXIX)
She married, in 1538, Michele di Niccolò Guicciardini.
A property at Pozzolatico.
This correspondence begins in 1540.
… stare a spasimare intorno alle tue lettere. (Letters, 1536–1548)
Letter of 11 July 1544.
Michelangelo is the first to inform his nephew, during an illness, in 1549, that he has put him in his will. — The will is thus conceived: “To Gismondo and to you, I leave all that I have; in such a way that my brother Gismondo, and you, my nephew, may have equal rights, and that neither may exercise authority over my goods without the consent of the other.”
L’amore del tarlo!
6 February 1546.

He adds: “It is true that, last year, I scolded you so much that you were ashamed, and you sent me a little cask of Trebbiano. Ah! that cost you quite enough!…”
From 1543 to 1553.
And elsewhere:

“You have not to look for money, but only for goodness and good reputation… You need a wife who will stay with you, and whom you can command, a wife who will not make a fuss and not go every day to weddings and feasts; for where they are courted, it is easy for them to become debauched (diventar puttana), especially when they have no family…” (Letters, first of February 1549)
… Storpiata o schifa… (Letters, 1543–1552)
Ibid., 19 December 1551.
He adds however: “But if you should not feel yourself sound enough, then it is better for you to resign yourself to living without bringing into the world other unhappy ones.” (Letters, 24 June 1552)
On 16 May 1553.
Letters, 20 May 1553.
Letters, 5 August 1553.
Born in 1554.
Born in 1555.
One must distinguish carefully between the periods of his life. In this long career one finds deserts of solitude, but also some periods of friendships. There is, around 1515, at Rome, a small circle of Florentines, free and bons vivants: — Domenico Buoninsegni, Lionardo sellajo, Giovanni Spetiale, Bartolommeo Verazzano, Giovanni Gellesi, Canigiani. — There is, a little later, under the pontificate of Clement VII, the witty society of Francesco Berni and of Fra Sebastiano del Piombo, devoted but dangerous friend, who reported to Michelangelo all the rumours that ran about him and stirred up his enmity against the party of Raphael. — There is above all, at the time of Vittoria Colonna, the circle of Luigi del Riccio, Florentine merchant, who advised him in his affairs and was his most intimate friend. He met there Donato Giannotti, the musician Arcadelt, and the handsome Cecchino. They had the common love of poetry, of music and of good food. It is for Riccio, in despair at the death of Cecchino, that Michelangelo writes his forty-eight funerary epigrams; and Riccio, for the sending of each epigram, dispatches to Michelangelo trout, mushrooms, truffles, melons, turtledoves, etc. (See Poesies, Frey edition, LXXIII) — After Riccio’s death in 1546, Michelangelo no longer had many friends, but disciples: Vasari, Condivi, Daniele da Volterra, Bronzino, Leone Leoni, Benvenuto Cellini. He inspired in them a passionate worship; for his part, he showed them a touching affection.
By his functions at the Vatican, no less than by the greatness of his religious spirit, Michelangelo was particularly in relations with the high dignitaries of the Church.
It may be curious to note, in passing, that Michelangelo knew Machiavelli. A letter from Biagio Buonaccorsi to Machiavelli, on 6 September 1508, informs him that he has sent him by Michelangelo money from a woman who is not named.
It was no doubt among artists that he had the fewest friends, — except at the end of his life, when he was surrounded by disciples who flattered him. — He had little sympathy for most of them, and did not hide it from them. He was on very bad terms with Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino, Francia, Signorelli, Raphael, Bramante, San Gallo. “Cursed be the day on which you ever said good of anyone!” Jacopo Sansovino writes to him, on 30 June 1517. — That did not prevent Michelangelo from rendering service later to Sansovino (in 1524), and to many others: but he had too passionate a genius to love any other ideal than his own; and he was too sincere to feign to love what he did not love. — He showed himself, however, very courteous towards Titian, on the occasion of his visit to Rome, in 1545. — But to the society of artists, whose culture, in general, left something to be desired, he preferred that of writers and of men of action.
They exchanged epistles in verse, friendly and burlesque. (Poesies, LVII and CLXXII) Berni made of Michelangelo a magnificent eulogy in his Capitolo a fra Sebastiano del Piombo. He says “that he was the Idea in itself of sculpture and architecture, as Astraea was the Idea of justice, which was all goodness and all intelligence.” He called him a second Plato; and, addressing the other poets, he said to them this admirable word, often cited: “Silence to you, harmonious instruments! You say words, he alone says things.”

Ei dice cose, et voi dite parole…
Dona Argentina Malaspina, in 1516.
Above all his letter to Francis I, on 26 April 1546.
Condivi thus begins his Life of Michelangelo:

“From the hour when the Lord God, by his all-powerful grace, has judged me worthy not only of seeing Michelangelo Buonarroti, the unique painter and sculptor, — which I should scarcely have had the audacity to hope for, — but of enjoying his conversations, his affection and his confidence, — in gratitude for such a benefit, I have undertaken to gather together everything that seems to me in his life worthy of praise and admiration, in order to be of use to others by the example of such a man.”
Francis I, in 1546; Catherine de’ Medici, in 1559. She wrote to him from Blois, “knowing, with all the world, how superior he was to anyone whatsoever in this century,” to beg him to sculpt the equestrian statue of Henri II, or at least to make the drawing of it. (14 November 1559)
In 1552. Michelangelo did not reply: — which wounded the duke. — When Benvenuto Cellini spoke of it again to Michelangelo, the latter replied in a sarcastic fashion.
In November 1560.
In October 1561.
Vasari. (Apropos of the reception Cosimo gave Michelangelo)
Francisco de Hollanda: Dialogues on Painting.
To Piero Gondi, 26 January 1524.
Vasari thus describes Michelangelo’s assistants: “Pietro Urbano of Pistoia was intelligent, but would never give himself any trouble. Antonio Mini would have wished to; but he was not intelligent. Ascanio della Ripa Transone gave himself trouble; but he never came to anything.”
Michelangelo worries about his smallest ailments. He takes an interest in a cut Urbano has given himself on the finger. He sees to it that he discharges his religious duties: “Go to confession, work well, pay attention to the house…” (Letters, 29 March 1518)
It was already with Antonio Mini that Michelangelo had wished to pass over into France, after his flight from Florence, in 1529.
The picture he had made during the siege, for the duke of Ferrara, but which he refused to give him, because the ambassador of Ferrara had failed to show him respect.
In 1531.
On 3 December 1555, a few days after the death of Michelangelo’s last brother, Gismondo.
23 February 1556.

Michelangelo thus concludes: “I commend myself to you, and beg you to excuse me to messer Benvenuto (Cellini), if I do not reply to his letter; but these thoughts cause me so much grief that I am incapable of writing.”

See also the poem CLXII:

Et piango et parlo del mio morto Urbino…
He wrote to Urbino’s wife, Cornelia, letters full of affection, in which he promised her to take little Michelangelo into his house, “to show him more love than even to the children of his nephew Lionardo, and to teach him everything that Urbino wished him to learn.” (28 March 1557) — He did not forgive Cornelia for marrying again, in 1559.
See in Vasari the account of his pranks.
Like almost all dark souls, Michelangelo sometimes had a buffoonish humour; and he wrote burlesque poems, in the taste of Berni. But his buffoonery always remains rough, and very close to the tragic. Thus, his lugubrious caricature of the infirmities of age. (Poesies, LXXXI) See also his parody of a love poem. (Ibid., XXXVII)

L’anima mia, che chon la morte parla…

Thus he lived alone with these humble friends: — his assistants and his fools, — and with other friends still humbler: his familiar animals, his hens and his cats.

At bottom, he was alone, and he was so more and more. “I am always alone, he wrote to his nephew, in 1548, and I speak with no one.” — He had little by little separated himself, not only from the society of men, but from their very interests, from their needs, from their pleasures, from their thoughts.

The last passion that bound him to the men of his time, — the republican flame, — had in its turn died out. Once more, it had cast a final stormy gleam, at the time of the two grave illnesses of 1544 and 1546, when Michelangelo had been taken in by his friend Riccio at the house of the Strozzi, republicans and exiles. Michelangelo, convalescent, had Roberto Strozzi, a refugee at Lyons, beg the king of France to remember his promises: he added that if Francis I came to re-establish liberty at Florence, he would commit himself to raising for him at his own expense an equestrian statue in bronze on the Piazza della Signoria. — In 1546, he gave to Strozzi, in gratitude for the hospitality received, the two Captives, which Strozzi presented to Francis I.

But that was only a flare of political fever, — the last. In some passages of his Dialogues with Giannotti, in 1545, he expresses pretty nearly the thoughts of Tolstoy on the uselessness of struggle and on non-resistance to evil:

It is great presumption to dare to kill someone, because one cannot know for certain whether from his death some good will come and whether from his life some good would not have come. So I cannot bear those men who believe that it is not possible to produce good without beginning by evil, that is to say by murder. The times change, new events occur, desires are transformed, men grow weary… And, in the end, there always happens what had not been foreseen.

The same Michelangelo who had made the apology of tyrannicide was now irritated against the revolutionaries who imagine that they change the world with an act. He knew well that he had been of those; and it is himself that he condemned bitterly. Like Hamlet, he doubted everything now, his thoughts, his hatreds, and all that he had believed. He turned his back on action.

“That good man, he wrote, who answered someone: “I am not a man of State, I am an honest man and a man of good sense,” — he was speaking the truth. If only my works at Rome gave me as few worries as the affairs of States!”

The truth is that he no longer hated. He could no longer hate. It was too late:

Ahime, lasso chi pur tropp’ aspetta,
Ch’ i’ gionga a suoi conforti tanto tardj!
Ancor, se ben riguardj.
Un generoso, alter’ e nobil core
Perdon’ et porta a chi l’offend’ amore.

Woe is me, weary from too long a waiting, woe is me, who come too late to what I had desired! And now, do you not know it? A generous, proud and noble heart pardons, and offers to him who offends it, love.

⁂

He lived at the Macel de’ Corvi, on the Forum of Trajan. He had there a house, with a small garden. He occupied it with a manservant, a maidservant, and his familiar animals. He did not have a happy hand with his domestics. “They were all negligent and dirty,” says Vasari. He changed them often and complained bitterly of them. He had no fewer quarrels with them than Beethoven; and his Ricordi (Notes), like Beethoven’s Conversation Notebooks, still keep the trace of these household quarrels: — “Oh! that she had never been here!” he writes, in 1560, after having sent away a maidservant, Girolama.

His chamber was dark as a tomb. “The spiders there spun a thousand works and wound their little spindles.” — Midway up the staircase, he had painted Death, bearing on its shoulder a coffin.

He lived like a poor man, scarcely ate, and, “not being able to sleep, he would get up at night to work with the chisel. He had made himself a cardboard helmet, and he wore in the middle of it, on his head, a lit candle, which, in this way, without troubling his hands, lit up his work.”

As he grew older, he wrapped himself in more solitude; it was for him a need, when everything slept in Rome, to take refuge in nocturnal work. Silence was a blessing to him, and the night a friend:

O night, O sweet time, though sombre, in which every effort comes at last to attain peace, he who exalts thee sees well and understands well; and he who honours thee has full judgement. Thou cuttest with thy scissors every weary thought, which the damp shadow and repose penetrate; and from down here often thou bearest me in dream up there, where I hope to go. O shadow of death, by whom is stopped every misery enemy of soul and heart, supreme and kindly remedy of the afflicted, thou restorest health to our sick flesh, thou driest our tears, thou unburdenest us of our fatigues, and thou washest the good of hatred and disgust.

Vasari paid a visit, one night, to the old man, alone in his deserted house, face to face with his tragic Pietà and his meditations:

When Vasari knocked, Michelangelo got up and came to the door, a candlestick in his hand. Vasari wanted to contemplate the sculpture; but Michelangelo let the light fall and go out, so that he could see nothing. And while Urbino went to fetch another, the master turned towards Vasari, and said: “I am so old that often death tugs at my hose, that I may come with her. One day, my body will fall, like this torch, and, like it, the light of my life will go out.”

The idea of death absorbed him, from day to day darker and more attractive.

“No thought is in me, he said to Vasari, in which death is not carved with the chisel.”

It seemed to him now the only happiness of life:

When my past is present to me, — and that happens to me at every hour, — O false world, then I know well the error and the fault of the human race. He who ends by consenting to thy flatteries and to thy vain delights prepares for his soul painful griefs. He knows it well, he who has had the proof of it, how often thou dost promise the peace and the good which thou hast not and which thou wilt never have. Thus the least favoured is he who remains the longest down here; and he who lives less long, more easily returns to Heaven…

Led by many years to my last hour, I recognise very late, O world, thy delights. Thou promisest the peace which thou hast not; thou promisest the rest which dies before it is born… I say it and know it by experience: he alone is chosen of heaven whose death follows close upon birth.

His nephew, Lionardo, celebrating the birth of his son, Michelangelo blamed him severely:

This pomp displeases me. It is not permitted to laugh, when the whole world weeps. It is wanting in sense to make such a feast for someone who has just been born. One must reserve one’s joy for the day when a man who has lived well dies.

And he congratulated him, the following year, on having lost a second son in infancy.

⁂

Nature, which his fever of passions and his intellectual genius had hitherto neglected, was, in his last years, a consoler to him. In September 1556, fleeing Rome threatened by the Spanish troops of the duke of Alba, he passed by Spoleto and stayed there five weeks, in the midst of woods of oaks and olive-trees, letting himself be penetrated by the serene splendour of autumn. It was only with regret that he returned to Rome, where he had been recalled, at the end of October. — “I left more than half of myself there, he wrote to Vasari; for truly peace is found only in the woods.”

Pace non si trova senon ne boschi.

And, returned to Rome, the old man of eighty-two composed a beautiful poem to the glory of the fields and of country life, which he opposed to the lies of the cities: it was his last poetic work, and it has all the freshness of youth.

But in Nature, as in art, as in love, it was God that he was seeking, and to whom he drew nearer, each day, more closely. He had always been a believer. If he was not the dupe of priests, of monks, of devout men and women, and if, on occasion, he mocked them roughly, there was never, it seems, the least doubt in his faith. At the illnesses or the death of his father and his brothers, the first of his cares was always that they should receive the sacraments. He had a confidence without bounds in prayer; “he believed in it more than in all medicines”; he attributed to its intercession all the good that had happened to him and the evil that had not happened to him. He had, in his solitude, crises of mystical adoration. Chance has preserved for us the memory of one of them: a contemporary account shows us the ecstatic face of the hero of the Sistine, alone, praying, at night, in his garden at Rome, and imploring with his sorrowful eyes the starry sky.

It is not true, as some have wished to make believed, that his faith was indifferent to the cult of the saints and of the Virgin. It would be a pleasant idea to make a Protestant out of the man who consecrated the last twenty years of his life to building the temple of the apostle Peter, and whose last work, interrupted by death, was a statue of Saint Peter. One cannot forget that on various occasions he wished to undertake great pilgrimages, in 1545 to Saint James of Compostela, in 1556 to Loretto, and that he was a member of the confraternity San Giovanni Decollato (Saint John the Baptist). — But it is true that, like every great Christian, it is in Christ that he lived and that he died. “I live poor with Christ,” he wrote to his father, as early as 1512; and, dying, he asked that he be made to remember the sufferings of Christ. From the friendship, — above all, from the death — of Vittoria Colonna, this faith took on a more exalted character. At the same time that his art devoted itself almost exclusively to the glory of the Passion of Christ, his poetry plunged into mysticism. He renounced art and took refuge in the great open arms of the Crucified:

The course of my life has arrived, on the stormy sea, in a frail bark, at the common port where one disembarks to render account and reason for every work, pious and impious. So, the passionate illusion which made of art for me an idol and a monarch, I know today how charged with errors it was; and I see clearly what every man desires for his harm. The amorous thoughts, the vain and joyful thoughts, what are they now that I draw near to two deaths? Of the one I am certain, and the other threatens me. Neither painting nor sculpture is any longer capable of soothing the soul, turned towards that divine love which opens, to take us, its arms upon the cross.

⁂

But the purest flower that faith and suffering made grow in that old unhappy heart was divine charity.

This man, whom his enemies accused of avarice, never ceased, all his life, to lavish his bounty on the unhappy, known and unknown. Not only did he always show the most touching affection for his old servants and for those of his father, — for a certain Mona Margherita, whom he took in after the death of old Buonarroti, and whose death caused him “more grief than if she had been a sister,” — for a humble carpenter, who had worked on the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel, and whose daughter he provided with a dowry… But he constantly gave to the poor, especially to the bashful poor. He liked to associate his nephew and his niece with these alms, to inspire in them the taste for it, to have them carried out by them, without naming himself: for he wished his charity to remain secret. “He preferred to do good rather than to appear to do it.” — By a trait of exquisite delicacy, he thought above all of poor young girls: he sought to have small dowries delivered to them in secret, to enable them to marry, or to enter a convent.

“Try to find a bourgeois in need, who has a daughter to marry or to put in a convent, he writes to his nephew. (I am speaking, — he adds, — of those who, in need, are ashamed to go and beg.) Give him the money I send you, but in secret; and make sure not to let yourself be deceived…”

And elsewhere:

“Inform me if you know yet another noble bourgeois in very great need, especially if he has daughters at home; it would please me to do him some good, for the salvation of my soul.”

Poesies, CX.
“The hens and messer the cock are triumphing, — Angiolini writes to him, in 1553, during one of his absences; — but the cats are inconsolable at no longer seeing you, although they do not lack for food.”
Letter from Riccio to Ruberto di Filippo Strozzi. (21 July 1544)
Letter to Lionardo, his nephew (1547).
Poesies, CIX, 64.

Michelangelo supposes here a dialogue of the poet with an exiled Florentine. — It is possible that he wrote this poem after the assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici by Lorenzino, in 1536. — It appeared for the first time, in 1543, with the music of Giacomo Arcadelt.
Among his domestics, I note, as a matter of curiosity, a Frenchman, Richard, Riccardo franzese. (18 June 1552. — Ricordi, page 606)
“I should like, he writes to Lionardo, a maidservant who is good and clean; but it is very difficult; they are all dirty and debauched. (Son tutte puttane e porche)… I give ten julies a month. I live poorly; but I pay well.” (Letters, 16 August 1550)
La mia scura tomba… (Poesies, LXXXI)
Dov’ è Aragn’ e mill’ opre et lavoranti
Et fan di lor filando fusaiuolo. (Ibid.)
On the coffin was this epitaph:

Io dico a coi, ch’ al mondo avete dato
L’anima e ‘l corpo e lo spirto ‘nsieme:
In questa cassa oscura è ‘l vostro lato.

(Ibid., CXXXVII)

“I say to you, who have given to the world soul, body and spirit together: in this dark box you are wholly contained.”
“He was very sober. When he was young, he was content with a little bread and wine, in order to be able to consecrate himself entirely to work. In his old age, from the time when he did the Last Judgement, he grew accustomed to drinking a little, but only in the evening, when the day’s work was finished, and in the most moderate fashion. Although he was rich, he lived like a poor man. Never, or rarely, did a friend eat with him: he was unwilling either to accept presents from anyone; for thus he regarded himself always as the obligee of the giver. His sobriety was the cause of his being always very alert, and of his needing very little sleep.” (Vasari)
Vasari, noticing that he did not use wax, but candles of goat tallow, sent him forty pounds. Michelangelo’s servant brought them to him; but Michelangelo refused to accept them. The servant said: “Master, my arms are broken from having carried them, and I have no desire to carry them back. If you do not want them, I will plant them in the mire of dry mud in front of the house, and I will light them all.” Then Michelangelo replied: “Put them there then; for I do not want you to play the fool in front of my door.” (Vasari)
See in the Annexes, XXIII. (Poesies, LXXVIII)

Frey dates this poem from around 1546, at the time of the Last Judgement and the Pauline Chapel. — Grimm puts it a little later, around 1554.

Another sonnet on night, — (Poesies, LXXVII) — is of the greatest poetic beauty, but more literary, and a little precious.
“Non nasce in me pensiero che non vi sia dentro sculpita la morte.” (Letters, 22 June 1555)
See in the Annexes, XXIV. (Poesies, CIX, 32)
Annexes, XXV. (Poesies, CIX, 34)
Letter to Vasari, dated: “I don’t know what day in April 1554.” (A di non so quanti d’aprile 1554.)
He had always paid rather little attention to nature, despite the years he spent outside the cities, at Carrara, or at Seravezza. The landscape holds an intimate place in his work; it is reduced to a few abbreviated, almost schematic, indications, in the frescoes of the Sistine. In this, Michelangelo stands apart from his contemporaries: from Raphael, from Titian, from Perugino, from Francia, from Leonardo. He despised the landscapes of the Flemish artists, then much in fashion: “rags, he said, hovels, very green fields shaded by trees, rivers and bridges, — what people call landscapes, — and many figures here and there.” (Dialogues of Francisco de Hollanda)
Letters, 28 December 1556.
I mean the very long, unfinished poem of one hundred and fifteen lines, which begins thus:

Nuovo piacere e di magiore stima
Veder l’ardite capre sopr’ un sasso
Montar, pasciendo or questa or quella cima…

(Poesies, CLXIII, pages 249–253 of Frey)

“It is a new pleasure and ever more relished, to see the bold goats climb upon a rock, grazing now on one, now on another peak…”

I follow here Frey’s interpretation, who dates the poem from October to December 1556. Thode is of another opinion, and attributes it to Michelangelo’s youth; but he does not give, in my opinion, sufficient reason for it.
In 1548, dissuading his nephew, Lionardo, from making a pilgrimage to Loretto, he advises him rather to spend the money on alms. “For if money is brought to the priests, God knows what they do with it!” (7 April 1548)

Sebastiano del Piombo having to paint a monk at San Pietro in Montorio, Michelangelo thinks that this monk will spoil everything: — “The monks have lost the world which is so great; it would not therefore be surprising if they were to lose a small chapel.”

At the time when Michelangelo was seeking to marry his nephew, a devout woman came to find him: she preached him a sermon, exhorted him to piety, and offered for Lionardo a pious girl, who was of good principles. “I replied to her, writes Michelangelo, that she would do better to occupy herself with weaving and spinning, than to fuss about people in this way, and to do business in holy things.” (Letters, 19 July 1549)

He wrote bitter poems, of a Savonarolan sentiment, against the sacrileges and simonies of Rome. Thus, the sonnet:

Qua si fa elmj di chalicj e spade,
E ‘l sangue di Christo si vend’ a giumelle…

“There, with chalices, they make swords and helmets; and the blood of Christ is sold by the double handful…” (Poesies, X, around 1520)
Letter to Buonarroto, concerning an illness of his father. (23 November 1516) — Letter to Lionardo, on the death of Giovan Simone. (January 1548): — “It would be pleasant to me to know whether he confessed himself and whether he received the sacraments well. If I knew that this was so, I should suffer less…”
“Più credo agli orazioni che alle medicine.” (Letter to Lionardo, 25 April 1549)
”… In the year of the Lord 1513, the first year of the pontificate of Leo X, Michelangelo, who was then at Rome, — and I believe, if I am not mistaken, that it was in the autumn, — one night, in the open air, in a garden of his house, was praying and raising his eyes to heaven. Suddenly, he saw a marvellous meteor, a triangular sign, with three rays: — one, which went off towards the East, brilliant and smooth, like the blade of a polished sword; and at the end, it curved into a hook; — another, ruby coloured, blue-red, which extended over Rome; — and the other, the colour of fire, forked, and of such length that it reached as far as Florence… When Michelangelo had seen this divine sign, he went into his house to fetch a sheet of paper, a pen, and colour; he drew the apparition; and, when he had finished, the sign disappeared…”

(Fra Benedetto: Vulnera diligentis, third part. Mss. Riccardianus 2985. — Cited by Thode, according to Villari)
Henry Thode.
When Leone Leoni, in 1560, engraved a medal with the effigy of Michelangelo, the latter had him trace on the reverse a blind man, led by a dog, with the inscription: Docebo iniquos vias tuas et impii ad te convertentur. (Vasari)
Crucifix, Entombment of Christ, Deposition from the Cross, Pietà.
Annexes, XXVI. (Poesies, CXLVII)

This sonnet, which Frey judges, not without reason, the most beautiful of all those of Michelangelo, dates from 1555–1556.

A great number of other poems express, with less beauty of form, but no less emotion and faith, an analogous sentiment. See in the Annexes, XXVII.
These rumours were put about by Aretino and by Bandinelli. The ambassador of the duke of Urbino used to tell anyone who would listen, in 1542, that Michelangelo had become immensely rich, by lending at usury the money he had received from Julius II, for the monument he had not executed. — Michelangelo had given some pretext, to a certain extent, for these accusations, by the hardness he sometimes showed in business matters, — [for example, with old Signorelli, whom he prosecuted in 1518, for a loan made in 1513], — and by an instinctive peasant rapacity of a hoarder, which was allied in him with his natural generosity. He amassed money and property; but it was, so to speak, with a mechanical and hereditary gesture. In reality, he was of an extreme negligence in business; he kept no accounts; he did not know what he had, and he gave with full hands. His family did not cease to draw upon his capital. He made royal presents to his friends, to his servants. Most of his works were given, not sold; he worked free at Saint Peter’s. No one condemned more severely than he the love of money: — “Greed for gain is a very great sin,” he writes to his brother Buonarroto. — Vasari protests indignantly against the calumnies of Michelangelo’s enemies. He recalls all that his master gave: — to Tommaso dei Cavalieri, to Bindo Altoviti, to Sebastiano del Piombo, to Gherardo Perini, priceless drawings; to Antonio Mini, the Leda, with all the cartoons and all the models; to Bartolommeo Bettini, an admirable Venus with Cupid kissing her; to the marquis del Vasto, a Noli me tangere; to Roberto Strozzi, the two Slaves; to his servant Antonio, the Deposition from the Cross, etc. — “I do not know, he concludes, how anyone can treat as a miser this man who lavished such works, worth thousands of scudi.”
Letters to Giovan Simone (1533), — to Lionardo Buonarroti. (November 1540)
Vasari.
“It seems to me that you neglect almsgiving too much,” he writes to Lionardo (1547).

“You write to me that you wish to give to this woman four scudi of gold, for the love of God: that pleases me.” (August 1547)

“Be careful to give where there is real need, and not to give out of friendship, but for the love of God… Do not say where the money comes from.” (29 March 1549)

“You have no mention to make of me.” (September 1547)

“It would please me more that you should consecrate the money you spend on presents for me to alms, for the love of God; for I believe there is much misery among you.” (1558)

“Old as I am, I should like to do a little good in alms. For I can and know how to do good in no other way.” (18 July 1561)
Condivi.
Letter to Lionardo. (August 1547)
Ibid. (20 December 1550)

Elsewhere, he inquires about one of the Cerretani, who has a daughter to put into a convent. (29 March 1549) — His niece Cecca intercedes with him for a poor girl, who is entering a convent; and he sends her, all happy, the sum she asks for. (To Lionardo, 31 May 1556)

“To marry a poor young girl, he says somewhere, is also a way of giving alms.”

…… Et l’osteria
È morte……

Death, so desired and so slow to come, —

c’a miseri la morte è pigra e tardi… came.

In spite of a robust constitution, which the monastic rigour of his life maintained, he had not been spared by illness. He had never entirely recovered from the two pernicious fevers of 1544 and 1546; the stone, the gout, and sufferings of every kind finished ruining him. In a sadly burlesque poem of his last years, he paints the picture of his miserable body, gnawed by infirmities:

I live alone and wretched, shut up like the pith in the bark of the tree… My voice is like a wasp imprisoned in a sack of skin and bone… My teeth wobble like the keys of a musical instrument… My face is a scarecrow… My ears do not cease to buzz: in the one, a spider weaves its web; in the other, a cricket sings all night… My catarrh, which rattles, does not let me sleep… Such is the end to which art, that bestowed glory on me, has led me. Poor crushed old man, I am annihilated, if death does not come quickly to my aid… Fatigues have quartered me, torn me, broken me, and the inn that awaits me, — is death…

“My dear messer Giorgio, he wrote to Vasari, in June 1555, you will recognise from my handwriting that I am come to the twenty-fourth hour…”

Vasari, who came to see him in the spring of 1560, found him extremely weakened. He scarcely went out, hardly slept any more; and everything led one to suppose that he would no longer live long. As he grew weaker, he became more tender and wept easily.

“I have been to see my great Michelangelo, writes Vasari. He was not expecting me to come, and showed me as much emotion as a father would feel, on finding again his lost son. He threw his arms about my neck and kissed me a thousand times, weeping with pleasure.” (lacrymando par dolcezza)

Yet he had lost nothing of his lucidity of mind and of his energy. In this same visit which Vasari recounts, he conversed at length with him on various artistic subjects, he gave him counsel for his works, and he accompanied him on horseback to Saint Peter’s.

In August 1561, he had a seizure. He had been drawing, three hours together, with his feet bare, when he was suddenly seized with pains and fell into convulsions. His servant Antonio found him unconscious. Cavalieri, Bandini and Calcagni came running. When they arrived, Michelangelo had come back to himself. A few days later, he was beginning again to go out on horseback, and was working on the drawings of the Porta Pia.

The intractable old man would not admit, under any pretext whatsoever, that anyone should occupy themselves with him. It was a continual torment for his friends to know him alone, at the mercy of a new attack, with careless and unscrupulous domestics.

The heir, Lionardo, had received formerly such rough rebuffs, when he had wanted to come to Rome for his uncle’s health, that he no longer dared risk it. In July 1563, he had Daniele da Volterra ask him whether it would be agreeable to him to see him; and, in order to prevent the suspicions that his interested coming could have inspired in the distrustful mind of Michelangelo, he had it added that his affairs were going well, that he was rich, and that he no longer needed anything. The shrewd old man had him replied that, since this was so, he was delighted, and that he would give the little he possessed to the poor.

A month later, Lionardo, very little satisfied with the reply, came back to the charge, and had expressed to him the anxieties he felt about his health and his entourage. This time, Michelangelo dispatched to him a furious letter, which shows the astonishing vitality of this man, at eighty-eight, — six months before his death:

I see from your letter that you give credence to certain envious rascals who, because they cannot rob me, nor make of me what they want, write you a heap of lies. They are a pack of scoundrels; and you are so stupid as to put faith in them about my affairs, as if I were a child. Send them packing: they are people who bring with them nothing but vexations, who do nothing but envy, and who lead the life of beggars. You write to me that I am suffering as regards the service; and I, I tell you that as regards the service, I could not be more faithfully served, nor better treated in all respects. And as for the fears of robbery you allude to, I tell you that the people who are in my house are such that I can be at peace on that account and have confidence in them. Therefore, think of yourself, and do not think of my affairs; for I know how to defend myself in case of need, and I am not a child. Fare well!

Lionardo was not alone in worrying about the inheritance. All Italy was Michelangelo’s heir, — above all the duke of Tuscany and the pope, who were eager not to lose the drawings and the plans relating to the constructions of Saint Lawrence and of Saint Peter. In June 1563, at the instigation of Vasari, duke Cosimo charged his ambassador, Averardo Serristori, with acting secretly with the pope so that, given Michelangelo’s physical weakening, an attentive surveillance should be exercised over his domestic staff and over all those who frequented his house. In case of sudden death, the inventory of all his goods: drawings, cartoons, papers, money, should at once be drawn up, and care should be taken that nothing be carried off, in the first confusion. Measures were taken for this purpose. It goes without saying that they took good care to let none of it be known to Michelangelo.

These precautions were not useless. The hour had come.

The last letter from Michelangelo is of 28 December 1563. For a year, he had hardly written himself any more; he dictated and signed; Daniele da Volterra kept up his correspondence.

He worked always. On 12 February 1564, he spent the whole day, standing, at his Pietà. On the 14th, he was taken with fever. Tiberio Calcagni, warned, came running, and did not find him at home. Despite the rain, he had gone for a walk on foot, in the Campagna. When he came back, Calcagni told him that it was not reasonable, that he should not have gone out in such weather.

— “What do you want? — Michelangelo replied. — I am ill, and I can nowhere find rest.”

The unsteadiness of his speech, his gaze, the colour of his face, made Calcagni very anxious. “The end may not come at once, he wrote at once to Lionardo; but I greatly fear that it is not far off.”

That same day, Michelangelo had Daniele da Volterra begged to come and stay with him. Daniele sent for the doctor, Federigo Donati; and, on 15 February, he wrote to Lionardo, at Michelangelo’s request, that he could come and see him, “but taking all his precautions; for the roads were bad.”

I have just left him,

he adds,

a little after eight o’clock, in full possession of his faculties, and peaceful of mind, but overcome by an obstinate torpor. He was so incommoded by it that between three and four o’clock, this afternoon, he tried to go out on horseback, as he is in the habit of doing, every evening, when the weather is fine. The cold weather and the weakness of his head and his legs prevented him: he turned back and sat down in an armchair, near the fireplace, which he much prefers to his bed.

He had near him the faithful Cavalieri.

It was only on the day before the day before his death that he consented to take to his bed. He dictated his will, in full consciousness, in the midst of his friends and his people. He made a gift of “his soul to God and of his body to the earth.” He asked to “return at least dead” to his beloved Florence. — Then, he passed

da l’orribil procella in dolce calma,
from the horrible tempest into the very sweet calm.

It was a Friday in February, towards five o’clock in the evening. The day was falling… “Last day of his life, the first in the kingdom of peace!…”

He rested at last. He had attained the goal of his desires: he was come out of time.

Beata l’alma, ove non corre tempo!

Poesies, LXXXI.
“For, for the unhappy, death is slothful…” Poesies, LXXIII, 30.
In March 1549: the waters of Viterbo were recommended to him, from which he benefited. (Letters to Lionardo) — He still suffered from the stone in July 1559.
In July 1555.
Free translation: — (See in the Annexes, XXVIII) (Poesies, LXXXI)
Letter to Vasari. (22 June 1535) — “Not only am I old, he was already writing to Varchi, in 1549, but I count among the dead.” (Non solo son vecchio, ma quasi nel numéro de’ morti.)
Letter from Vasari to Cosimo de’ Medici. (8 April 1560)
He was eighty-five years old.
It was then that he remembered the contract concluded, sixty years before, with the heirs of Pius III, for the Piccolomini altar of Siena, and that he wished to execute it.
Letter to Lionardo. (21 August 1563)
Vasari.
Reference is to the unfinished Pietà of the Palazzo Rondanini. — (Letter from Daniele da Volterra to Lionardo, 11 June 1564.)
Letter from Tiberio Calcagni to Lionardo, 14 February 1564.
Letter from Daniele da Volterra to Vasari. (17 March 1564)
Poesies, CLII.
Friday 18 February 1564. — Tommaso dei Cavalieri, Daniele da Volterra, Diomede Leoni, the two doctors Federigo Donati and Gherardo Fidelissimi, and the servant Antonio dei Franzese, were present at his death. — Lionardo did not arrive at Rome until three days later.
De giorni mie’,……………………
L’ultimo primo in piu tranquilla corte…

(Poesies, CIX, 41)
“Blessed the soul, in which time no longer runs!” (Poesies, LIX)