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CHAPTER XXIII

WHEREIN THERE PASSES BY, IN THE STREETS OF ROME, UNHAILED, THE GIANT OF THE RENAISSANCE

MICHELANGELO was the son of Ludovico Buonarroti Simone, a Florentine of consequence, since he was Governor (podestà) of Chiusi and Caprese, thereto appointed by Lorenzo de' Medici but a few months before his child was born, as Messer Ludovico Buonarroti's own diary bears witness in the year 1475 : To-day there was born unto me a male child, whom I have named Michelagnolo. He saw the light at Caprese, whereof I am Podestà, on Monday morning, 6th March, between four and five o' the clock." So it came by a strange whim of fortune that the child, destined to become the supreme giant of the Renaissance, was born under the shadow of the Sasso della Verna, where St. Francis of Assisi had seen visions, not in the Florence that was the Athens of the Renaissance, wherein Paganism was a-riot and triumphant.

Michelangelo was reputed by his pupils, Vasari and Condivi, to be close kin of the noble house of the Counts of Canossa, and he shared their belief in his aristocratic birth; gentle he was by blood, of ancient Florentine stock through both father and mother, if no kin of the Canossas. Ludovico Buonarroti, the father, held his post for a year, after which he returned to Settignano village, which overlooks [206] Florence from amidst its vines, to the ancient home of the Buonarroti amid the olives. The small child's horoscope was cast before the move, the astrologer prophesying that the stars had revealed for the little fellow's destiny that he was " to perform wonders with mind and hands."

Now Settignano was the home of the stone-masons and workers in marble, and Michelangelo himself, in after years, used to jest that from his foster-mother, a stone-mason's wife, he had sucked the craving for sculpture in his milk as a babe. The mallet and chisel and bits of marble were the toys of his childhood. By ten he could employ his tools with skill that outdid his foster-father, and his playtime was given to chalk and charcoal and the copying of such decorations in stone as he could find-those were busy days for the stone-carvers of Settignano, where her hundreds of workers in stone were hard put to it to carry out the orders of the merchant-princes who were rivalling Lorenzo the Magnificent in the raising of splendid palaces in Florence.

The sight of the stone being hewn into living shapes fired the art in the lad. But the father, Ludovico Buonarroti, had the modern genteel contempt of the Respectable towards the practice of art. Young Michelangelo, torn out of the village, was sent to a grammar-school in Florence, out of sound of the music of hammer and chisel ringing upon marble. But the schoolmaster, like the father, found the rod of no avail-the boy sought his comrades amongst the pupils of the Florentine artists, bending all his will to the joying in art. Of his chief boy-friends was Francesco Granacci, who was working in Ghirlandaio's studio, who lent the eager lad drawings to copy, and would take him to the great man's studio to see the latest sensation. The pursuit of learning was soon a [207] farce, though the art-despising father flogged the lad to keep him from straying into art's ways. However, Ludovico at last shrugged his shoulders at his son's vulgar tastes, and at thirteen Michelangelo entered the studio of the most highly reputed painter in Florence of that day, being apprenticed to Ghirlandaio on the 1st of April 1488. As he was to receive a small wage during his three years, he was probably already a capable lad. He at once began to astound his master by his realistic force, grew rapidly in craftsmanship, and soon the " child of such tender years " drew from Ghirlandaio the famous remark : " This boy knows more than I do." Whether he learnt much from his master, who is reputed early to have grown jealous of him, he varied the menial duties of an artist's apprentice by re-drawing Ghirlandaio's cartoons on to the walls of the Church of Santa Maria Novella, painting draperies, and courageously correcting his master's drawing as he re-drew from the cartoons on to the wall. When it is realised that the unfinished Madonna and Child with the infant John the Baptist and Angels at the National Gallery was wrought by this boy between the age of thirteen and sixteen, during his apprenticeship, it is small wonder that Ghirlandaio realised that he had nothing to teach the lad.

Now it so chanced that Lorenzo the Magnificent had collected into the gardens of the Medici at San Marco much antique sculpture with the intention of raising the Florentine achievement from the neglect that had fallen since Donatello had passed away, and he made Donatello's foreman, one Bertoldo, keeper, to instruct such youths as cared to study there. Ghirlandaio, asked by Lorenzo to choose from his apprentices such as he considered the most promising, sent his two most brilliant pupils, [208] Francesco Granacci and Michelangelo. And here it was that Michelangelo discovered his career. Steeped in the Hellenic spirit, the art of sculpture was revealed to him through the tradition of Donatello ; for Bertoldo, his teacher in sculpture, though old and unable to work, had had the high gifts to finish the great pulpits of San Lorenzo, begun by Donatello. Under Bertoldo, and in such an atmosphere, the lad increased rapidly in skill; his first sculpture, The Mask of a grinning Faun, caught the eye of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who forthwith persuaded the lad's father to let the youth go to his palace, where he gave him a good room, and treated him like a son. Living the life of the courtier, in intimate friendship with the family of the reigning sovereign of Florence, the young fellow was soon the prey to a secret, hopeless, but overwhelming passion for the beautiful Luigia de' Medici, who was to live so short a span, dying in 1494. Seated at the prince's table, where the lad heard the converse of the greatest of the age, the poet Angelo Poliziano one day suggested the Battle of the Centaurs and Lapithae to the fifteen-year-old youngster, who thereupon set to work upon the low-relief, his first masterpiece, revealing a power, a freedom and originality, a sense of life and action, and a keen knowledge of the human body, that are close upon a miracle. His bold vision and his original genius at once asserted themselves.

It was about this time that the serious youth was much impressed by the preaching of Savonarola.

The youth was now definitely bent on the career of a sculptor, but he gave many hours of his day to drawing -working, like most of his comrades, from the frescoes of Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel of the church of the Carmine ; and there it was that, being frankly criticised by Michelangelo, one of his fellow-students-the proud and [209] ill-conditioned Piero Torrigiani-became so furious that he savagely struck Michelangelo a brutal blow upon the nose, which smashed the cartilage and disfigured him for life, adding ruggedness to his already rugged countenance. But under the young fellow's outer ruggedness and grimness lurked an exquisite and sensitive soul. The bully Torrigiani was banished from Florence, only to be recalled on Michelangelo's earnest pleading to Lorenzo on his behalf.

The blow was the beginning of uglier blows by Fortune. The young fellow had scarce completed his Battle of the Centaurs and Lapitbae when, on the 8th of April 1492, to his overwhelming grief, his beloved friend and generous patron, Lorenzo the Magnificent, died-a grief not only to Michelangelo but to all Italy, to whom his death was a public calamity. The youth, overborne with grief, left his three-years home and returned to his father's house. His art saved him. Buying a large piece of marble, he hewed a Hercules from it, which was set up in the Strozzi Palace, until the siege of Florence in 1530, when, bought by Giovanni Battista della Palla, it was sent as a gift to Francis I., King of France-and has now wholly vanished.

Setting himself doggedly to a knowledge of anatomy, he won the friendship of the Prior of Santo Spirito, who gave him a room wherein he dissected the bodies of executed criminals.