Michelangelo's boy-companion, Piero de' Medici, on succeeding his father, Lorenzo the Magnificent, called Michelangelo back to the palace. But the proud and insolent son had none of his father's great gifts. His coarse manners and vulgar tastes soon had him foul of the people. Michelangelo was the last to bear with him. A tasteless boast of the young prince that he had two powerful [210] men in his service, Michelangelo and a Spanish groom, deeply humiliated the artist, who found himself classed with such a fellow ; and, too proud to suffer such treatment, and foreseeing the early fall of Piero, Michelangelo left Florence early in 1494 for Venice. Unable to get work, he went on to Bologna, which town he entered only to find himself charged with the offence of being without a passport, under a heavy fine, and with empty pockets. He was saved out of the trouble by Gian Francesco Aldovrandi, a gentleman of the town, who not only paid the fine but took him to his home and treated him with great honour. In the November of this year Piero de' Medici had to fly from Florence. It was whilst with Aldovrandi that Michelangelo completed an unfinished statue of San Petronio, and carved the statuette of a kneeling angel holding a candlestick for the shrine of the saint in the church of San Domenico, which works were to prove so disastrous to his stay in Bologna; for the craftsmen of the place, bitterly complaining that the young fellow was taking the bread out of their mouths, became threatening, and Michelangelo hurriedly returned to Florence in the spring of 1495. Michelangelo came back to Florence to find the beautiful Luigia de' Medici dead some months past, to find also that the fiery and passionate preaching of Savonarola had set up popular government. The Dominican was a man after the young artist's heart. Overwhelming in energy, fiercely confident in his faith, violent in act, the priest's gloomy forebodings and eloquence roused the young fellow to enthusiasm. Michelangelo, but twenty, was made a member of the General Council of Citizens. He was soon at work on a statue of the Youthful St. John the Baptist, by some said to be the one at Berlin, which he wrought for Lorenzo di Pier Francesco, cousin to the fugitive Piero de' Medici. [211] He thereby won the admiration of Lorenzo, and his close friendship ; and it was Lorenzo who, finding Michelangelo at work on his famous Sleeping Cupid, and struck by its Greek spirit, persuaded him to bury it, and thereby complete its antique aspect. Michelangelo, to test its likeness to the antique achievement, did so. Thereafter sent to Rome, it was bought by Raffaelo Riario, Cardinal di San Giorgio, as a perfect example of the Greek genius. The jest was to lead Michelangelo to Rome. The Cardinal, finding out the facts, which the young artist took small pains to hide, was furious at being befooled; but, on cooling, came to the shrewd decision that the artist who could so deceive him by his skill was no mean sculptor, and forthwith sent one of his gentlemen to Florence to bring him back with him to Rome. The messenger, finding his way to Michelangelo, soon had the story of the Greek masterpiece, and found the young sculptor eager to leave for Rome-he was living suspect of his fellows in Florence, as was inevitable from his close friendship with the Medici. So, on a day at the end of the June of 1496, in his twenty-first year, he entered the Rome of his desire for the first time. The last heard of the Sleeping Cupid was at the sack of Urbino in 1592, when it became a part of the booty of Cæsar Borgia, who gave it to the Marchioness of Mantua.

Michelangelo was to find disappointment in coming to Rome. The Cardinal's sole order was for a cartoon of Saint Francis receiving the Stigmata, that the Cardinal's barber might paint it ! As luck would have it, a wealthy Roman, one Jacopo Galli, ordered a Bacchus, now at Florence, and a Cupid, said to be the one at the South Kensington Museum. The half-drunken Bacchus was to lead to a [212] strange commission. Vastly admired, it drew the envoy of the King of France, Cardinal De la Groslaye de Villiers, to order the group of Our Lady holding the dead Christ in her Arms, as the contract made on the 26th of August 1498 shows, and "that the said Michelangelo shall furnish the said work within one year." This would seem to be the superb Pietà at St. Peter's in Rome. The terms of the contract-and contracts are not greatly given to flattery- prove that Michelangelo's repute in this, his twenty-third year, was already very great.

But the young fellow's troubles and embarrassments were begun. His father became involved in heavy money difficulties. Michelangelo's affection for and generosity to his family glow in his letters. He pinched and wanted that he might send home every piece of money he earned. He provided for his three younger brothers-one of whom, Giovan Simone Buonarroti, was a ne'er-do-weel who was to give him continual anxiety. Behind the rugged and stern outer man, Michelangelo hid a tender and unselfish soul. The poor way in which he lived-that every letter home might carry money with it-not only was a sad drain on his body, but compelled upon the rising sculptor a poverty of appearance that did him no good amongst his patrons. It even drew from his father the famous letter in which he is urged not to stint himself, since " if you fall ill (which God forbid), you are a lost man. Above all things, never wash ; have yourself rubbed down, but never wash ! "

It was the spring of 1501, he being twenty-six, that Michelangelo again set foot in Florence, famous, and hailed as the first sculptor of his age. Of the orders that poured in upon him was that from Cardinal Piccolomini, afterwards Pope Pius III., for fifteen statues of saints for the [213] Duomo of Siena. But the young fellow had set eyes upon a huge block of marble which had been abandoned as useless, after some work upon it by a mediocre fellow, in the Opera del Duomo at Florence ; and Michelangelo flung himself with wonted energy at the task of hewing a colossal statue from it. Two years of strenuous work saw the maimed marble yield forth one of the mightiest masterpieces of sculpture-the immortal David. The colossal statue, Il Gigante as they called it, was, on the I4th day of the May of 1504, Michelangelo's twenty-ninth year, dragged to the Piazza della Signoria, and set up there by the Florentines ; and there it stood until 1873, when it was taken into the Academy. In the riots of 1527 the left arm was broken by a stone, but Vasari and Cecchino de' Rossi gathered the pieces, and restored them to the arm some sixteen years later.

A gigantic David by Michelangelo was also wrought in bronze, in 1502, which the Florentine Republic gave to the French statesman Florimon Robertet ; which, though it stood a hundred years in the chateau of Bury, near Blois, has wholly vanished.

It was whilst at work at the great David that Michelangelo also wrought the two circular marble low-reliefs of the Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John, now, the one at Florence, the other at the Royal Academy in London.

Of the twelve colossal statues of the Apostles that he started upon in the April of 1503, one to be finished each year, Michelangelo only worked upon the incomplete St. Matthew, now in the Academy at Florence. But he painted the round panel (tondo) of The Holy Family for a merchant-prince of Florence, one Agnolo Doni (that same Doni whose portrait was painted by Raphael), now at the [214] Uffizi-the only easel picture which can with certainty be said to be by him, unless it be the unfinished Entombment in the National Gallery in London, not only a superb treasure, but vastly interesting as showing his method of painting in tempera on panel-revealing his underpainting on a green ground.

It was in the August of 1504, the year of the David being set up in Florence, that the Gonfaloniere of the Republic, his friend and protector Piero Soderini, paid the young artist the high compliment of setting him to the decoration of a wall in the Sala del Gran Consiglio of the Palazzo Vecchio, opposite to the wall on which the great Leonardo da Vinci was engaged. Leonardo da Vinci, at the very height of his career, was making the cartoon of the Fight for the Standard at the battle of Anghiari, at which, in 1440, Florence overthrew Niccolò Piccinino. Michelangelo chose an event in the war with Pisa. We have Benvenuto Cellini's evidence, who copied the cartoon in 1513, nine years later-for he writes of it, and his witness is of supreme value : " Michelangelo showed a number of foot-soldiers, who, the season being summer, had gone to bathe in the Arno. He drew them at the moment that the alarm is sounded ; and the men, all naked, rush to arms. So superb is their action, that nothing of ancient or of modern art lives which touches the same lofty height of excellence ; and, as I have already said, the design of the great Leonardo was also most admirably beautiful. These two cartoons stood, one in the Palace of the Medici, the other in the hall of the Pope. So long as they remained, they were the school of the world."