in the midst of political and social upheavings, the most violent, we rarely find these great single-minded men give way to the demands of personal interest, disregard the dignity of life, or forget that genius does not exempt them from the cultivation of the humblest virtues. Not everything, it is true, was perfect in this time, far from it; if the Renaissance had its heroes and saints it had also its Borgias; the highest faculties were often found associated with infamy and cowardice. These monstrous combinations which astonish and confound the judgment, and offend the inner sense, will ever be seen where man is to be found; but they are comparatively rare, while examples of the contrary are numberless and striking.

If there is one man who is a more striking representative of the Renaissance than any of his contemporaries, it is Michelangelo. In him character is on a par with genius. His life of almost a century and marvellously active, is spotless. As an artist we can not believe that he can be surpassed. He unites in his wondrous individuality the two master faculties, which are, so to speak, the poles of human nature, whose combination in the same individual creates the sovereign greatness of the Tuscan school-invention and judgment—a vast and fiery imagination directed by a method precise, firm, and safe. Such giants whom antiquity would have made into gods, are thus thrown far and wide on the pages of history as living examples of the greatness to which our race may attain, and to which the ambition of man may aspire. If it is beyond our power to equal them, we can at least contemplate them from afar, follow them, and it does not seem to me out of place to call attention to those mighty beings to which Liberty gave birth amidst the raging of storms.

BIRTII AND INFANCY OF MICHELANGELO-APPRENTICED ΤΟ GHIRLANDAIO-LORENZO DE' MEDICI BECOMES HIS PATRON -LIFE IN FLORENCE GRIEF AT LORENZO'S DEATHSTUDIES IN LITERATURE AND ANATOMY-PIERO DE' MEDICI RECALLS HIM FROM HOME-FIRST VISIT TO ROME-THE

PIETÀ.

ICHELANGELO was born on the 6th of March, 1475,

M near Arezzo, in Casentino. His father, Lodovico 1

Buonarroti Simoni, was at the time podestà of Castello di Chiusi and Caprese. Condivi maintains, and Vasari seems to believe, that the Buonarroti were descendants of the Counts of Canossa, a very ancient family, closely allied by blood to royalty. Gori, in his notes upon Condivi, even reproduces a genealogical tree of the Buonarroti family, the original of which, going back to 1260, he had seen. This remote origin, however, which was ordinarily accepted in Michelangelo's time, now appears to be more than doubtful, Still we know this much, that the Buonarroti had been long settled in Florence, that on several occasions they had served the Re

1 M. Clément calls him, in error, Lionardo Buonarroti.

public in not unimportant posts, and the name of Michelangelo requires no other nor higher origin.

His early biographers, not content with bringing him forth. from a royal stem, enlarge complacently upon the omens which attended his birth. His mother, bearing him beneath her girdle, fell from a horse without serious injury. One of his brothers died in his cradle of a contagious disease without giving it to him. Lastly, at the moment of his birth, Mercury and Venus were in conjunction with Jupiter in the ascendant, a clear sign of the lofty destiny which was awaiting him.

However this may be, Lodovico Buonarroti's year of office. having expired, he returned to Florence, and put the child to nurse at Settignano, where he had a small property, with the wife of a stone carver. Many years after Michelangelo used to recall this fact to Vasari. "Dear Georgio," he would say, "if my mind is worth anything I owe it to the clear air of your Arezzo country, just as it is to the milk which I sucked that I owe the use of the mallets and chisels for carving my figures."

Lodovico Buonarroti was not rich. The income of his Settignano property, which he had valued, was scarcely sufficient to provide for a numerous family. Several of his children he put into the silk and woollen business, but soon seeing that young Michelangelo had remarkable tastes, he made him begin a course of study, and sent him to Francesco da Urbino, who kept a grammar school at Florence. Here Michelangelo made no progress. The only taste he showed was for drawing, and he spent all the time he could steal from his studies in covering the walls of his father's house with sketches. His first attempts were still in existence in the middle of th eighteenth century, and Gori mentions that the Cavaliere

APPRENTICED TO GHIRLANDAIO.

7

Buonarroti, a descendant of Michelangelo's uncle, showed him amongst other sketches, one of these, drawn in black chalk, upon a staircase wall in the Settignano Villa, representing a man with his right arm raised and his head down. The drawing was firm and vigorous, an evidence of the boy's precocity. Lodovico would not hear of an art which he thought unworthy of his family; his brothers joined him in trying to turn the bent of Michelangelo's mind. "He was often scolded says Condivi, "and even severely beaten." He became intimate at this time with Francesco Granacci, a boy of his own age, and a pupil of Ghirlandaio, who managed to get him some of his master's drawings. Michelangelo's persistence at last overcame the prejudices of his father. He entered into an agreement with the author of the frescos in S. Maria Novella, by which the boy was to be received for three years into his workshop, and to receive a salary of twenty-four golden florins, which the master, contrary to all custom, undertook to give his pupil. The contract is dated April 1st, 1489. Michelangelo was consequently only fourteen years old.

Here in this charming church of Santa Maria Novella, which in after years he called his fiancée, Michelangelo was able for the first time to give himself up unreservedly to his taste for painting, under the guidance of one of the most celebrated artists of the day. So rapid was his progress that a short time after he entered the workshop Ghirlandaio remarked, "This youngster knows more than I." If we may believe Condivi too, it was not without jealousy that he saw him correcting with a firm touch his own designs and those of his best pupils.

Can we, however, as some critics have done, assign to a boy of fifteen that admirable painting in tempera, which was the

greatest ornament of the Manchester Exhibition? Is the well-known precocity of Michelangelo's genius enough to account for so much knowledge and maturity? For my

part I confess that I can not think so. The painting is certainly not by Domenico Ghirlandaio, as up to this time has been believed. I do not question its authenticity-that is plain. Not to speak of the size of the composition and of the drawing, of the character of the Virgin's head, of the incomparable beauty of the angels on the right, of certain tricks which Michelangelo never lost, such as making the. feet too small by a refinement of elegance-giving to his children those noses, retrousses and somewhat faunesque, which are seen in the Sixtine, it would be evidence enough to remark the distinct relationship of this work to the Virgin of the Medici chapel. On the other hand the elegance of the draperies, an ease of drawing, which points, I confess, to recent practice in fresco, some details which recall the manner of Ghirlandaio, do not seem to me sufficient ground for assigning such a work to so young a man. What seems to me probable is, that this painting was not executed till Michelangelo had left the workshop, and had improved his taste and talent by the study of Masaccio's frescos and the Antiques in the Garden of San Marco between 1492 and 1495, during those years of early youth which must have been fruitful, yet of which the biographers have left us so little information.

Michelangelo did not finish his apprenticeship with Ghirlandaio. On the death of Ghiberti and of Donatello, Sculpture had no distinguished representative in Florence. Lorenzo de' Medici wanted to support it. He collected in his gardens by the Piazza of San Marco a large number of statues. and of fragments of the antique, and he established a school