ease, Michelangelo was intimately associated with the most distinguished and celebrated men of his time-not reckoning the seven Popes who employed him, and with whom, despite some storms, he lived on terms of the utmost familiarity and consideration. Cardinals Pole, Bembo, Hippolytus de Medici, and so many others were among his most intimate and constant friends. As to his pupils, Sebastiano del Piombo, Daniele da Volterra, Rosso, Pontormo, Vasari, we know from the testimony of the last-named what zeal he devoted to their protection, with what generosity he gave them, not only his advice, but plans, drawings, and sometimes the entire composition of their pictures.

He seems, however, to have preferred the friendship of unimportant people, whose simple habits and ingenuousness pleased him, to that of great personages. He was attached not only to his servant Urbino, whom he treated as a friend, but to Topolino, his marble cutter, whose graceless sketches he used to correct with the utmost care, and to Menighella, "an ordinary painter of Valdarno, but a very pleasant person, who used to come from time to time and beg him to draw a St. Roch or a St. Anthony for him, from which he used to paint a picture for the country folk." Michelangelo, whom it was hard to induce to work for kings, would give up his work at once to compose simple drawings, which he adapted to the taste of his friend. Among other things, he made a model of a Christ on the Cross for Menighella, with a mould for making copies in cardboard, which the painter used to sell in the country; and he "used to be much amused with the little adventures which happened to the artist on the tramp."

Good and generous, loading his pupils and friends with kindness, comforting the unfortunate, giving dowries to poor girls, enriching his nephew, to whom he never gave less than

three or four thousand crowns at a time, he was himself immovable in respect to presents, "which he always looked upon as so many ties, which were irksome, and difficult to break." He used to live poorly enough, and to say à propos of this to Condivi, " Although I am rich, I have always lived like a poor man." He was hard upon himself, and even wore dog-skin gaiters upon his bare legs. He rarely admitted a friend to his table; when he was at work he was satisfied with a scrap of bread and a drop of wine, which he used to eat without breaking off from work. He lived in this frugal way up to the time when he began the last pictures in the Sixtine. Then he was an old man, and he allowed himself a simple meal at the end of the day. Michelangelo was a man of extraordinary activity, but irregular in work. He used sometimes to remain for whole months absorbed in meditation, without touching a brush or a chisel; then, when he had made out his composition, he would set to work with a sort of fury. He used often to give up his work in the middle, discouraged, and even in despair, because, says Vasari, "his imagination was so lofty that his hands could not express his great and awful thoughts." Generally he used to put his first idea hurriedly to paper, and afterwards take up each part in detail, or sometimes the whole, as may be seen in several of his designs, finished with the utmost minuteness. Vasari asserts that he used often to draw the same head ten or twelve times over before he was satisfied with it. Some of his studies are executed with so sure a touch that he was able to use them for models, as the bench-marks in them show; but generally he used to make little models in wax, many of which are preserved. He would attack the marble without taking precise measurements, and found himself more than once out of his calculations thereby. He took very little

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sleep, and used often to get up in the night to work. He used to wear a sort of cardboard helmet, which he contrived so as to hold a light, and thus the part on which he wanted to work was perfectly illuminated without any incumbrance to his hands. We possess several portraits of Michelangelo. The minute accounts which his biographers supply, and which would seem childish in the case of any other man, enable us to picture him pretty precisely. He was of middle height, with broad shoulders, slender and well proportioned; of a dry nervous temperament, his complexion was full of health and vigour, which was due as much to the regularity of his life as to nature; he had a round head, high temples, a broad square forehead with seven lines straight across it, and a nose, as is well-known, disfigured by a blow from the fist of Torrigiano; his lips were thin, the under one a little projecting, which is especially observable in the profile; his eyebrows were somewhat thick, eyes rather small than large, of the colour of horn, with scintillating specks of yellow and blue; hair black, and beard of the same colour, rather ragged, and four or five inches long, forked, and only towards the end of his life interspersed with many white hairs; his expression was agreeable, lively, and decided.

Such was Michelangelo, the last and greatest of the severe masters. This giant form closes and consummates the movement begun by Dante and Giotto, carried on by Orcagna, Brunelleschi, and Leonardo da Vinci. Though doubtless surpassed by many of his predecessors and contemporaries in some of the arts which he cultivated, this proud and gloomy genius has stamped upon his every work an awe-inspiring impress. It may be said of him that he had no ancestors ; for he so immeasurably surpassed his predecessors, that notwith

standing everything with which his age had endowed him, he had all the characteristics of those exceptional beings who owe to circumstances nothing but the opportunity for the free development of their extraordinary faculties. He was one of those men who derive their existence and their greatness from themselves alone, prolem sine matre creatam; and the day on which he finished his long and glorious career, his whole self died with him." My knowledge," he himself said, "will give birth to a tribe of know-nothings;" and it would be unfair to hold him responsible for the extravagances of his impotent successors, who fancied that they were imitating him in their affectation of the sublime, forgetting that without force, audacity is only ridiculous. It is not alone by the creative might of his all-powerful imagination, but by an unparalleled combination of the highest and rarest faculties, that he towers above the most celebrated men of that age of prodigies. Painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, poet, citizen, he stands forth among Dante, Leonardo, Brunelleschi, Raphael, like a Titan, the last-surviving scion of a perished race, lordly commander of that army of giants. And since his character was as lofty as his genius, is not his true place the foremost among the great ones of the modern era?

7

THE name of Lodovico di Leonardo Buonarroti Simoni, the father of Michelangelo, is almost banished from the pages of M. Clément, and rare mention is made of his family. Michelangelo's mother, Francesca di Neri, died two years after his birth, and there is no allusion to his step-mother in any of his letters. He accustomed himself to believe that he was related to the Canossa family, and used their arms. There was, however, no relationship. Still his family was noble, though his father was content to live in poverty. He had no trade, but lived on the small income derived from his property, and showed his pride in his objection to his son's profession. While his son was in Rome, he led a life of hardship and discontent in Florence. Michelangelo's brothers would on their own account deserve little notice. Their appearance, however, is necessary in any history of him, as their behaviour is a shadow which brings out the lights in his character.

1 For a more complete account of the family of Buonarroti, see the excellent Life of Michelangelo, recently published by Mr. C. Heath Wilson.