[221] Pupil of Ghirlandaio he may have been, but one cannot help but be struck by the fact that it was to Leonardo da Vinci, and above all to Signorelli, that Michelangelo owed the largest debt of what revelation in painting had been vouchsafed to him.

In 1512 Soderini, the old friend of Michelangelo in Florence, fled from that city, leaving the gates open to Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici.

Pope Julius II. must have had foreboding of the coming of the Great Reaper, as he impatiently hurried Michelangelo to that uncovering of his masterwork in the November of 1512 : within four months his violent spirit and fierce energy of will lay serene and stilled, on the 21st of the following February of 1513. Mayhap he felt the Reaper near : just before death came to him he ordered Michelangelo to finish the great Tomb, appointing his nephew, Cardinal Aginense, and Cardinal Santi Quattro, to see to the completion of the great design ; but they, baffled by the expense, caused Michelangelo to reduce the scheme, who thereupon recast it, and with feverish eagerness and delight set himself to its completion. It was not to be. Michelangelo's friend and playfellow at the Court of the Medici, Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, was elected Pope after Julius II. ; and as soon as the great celebrations of his enthronement as Pope Leo X. were done, he set Michelangelo, to whose bitter protests he would not listen, to decorate the façade of San Lorenzo in Florence with sculptures ; so " Michelangelo left the Tomb, and betook himself, weeping, to Florence."

Indeed, his grief must have been great. By the June of this year of 1515, he had finished the Moses and the Captives in marble, and the "relief" panels were ready for the casting in bronze. The two years of his precious life [222] and genius that were now wasted to the world in sending him to quarry the marble for the façade of San Lorenzo would have seen the making of the great Tomb. Nor was the façade to reach completion. The Pope's only brother, Giuliano de' Medici, and his nephew, Lorenzo, dying, he freed Michelangelo on the l0th of the March of 1520 from his bond to decorate the façade, and ordered him instead to build a new sacristy to their memory, and raise a monument to them therein.

Seizing the opportunity to fulfil a seven-years old promise to a Roman patron, Metello Vari, for a nude Christ bearing the Cross, he sent to Rome in the summer of 1521 the majestic Risen Christ, now in the church of the Minerva, the hands and feet being left in the rough to prevent damage during transport-which were finished by the crude workmanship of Pietro Urbino, and mauled in the doing. But Leo X.'s great patronage of art was to last all too short a while-he died on the 1st of December in 1521, being succeeded by the pious Dutchman who vowed the Sistine Chapel " nothing but a room full of naked people." His secret desire to have it whitewashed was balked by death; and 1523 saw Giulio de' Medici reign in his stead as Clement VII. The following year, Michelangelo, having finished the new sacristy at San Lorenzo, began the Medicean tombs to be placed therein, harassed the while by the building of a library, also, that the Pope urged upon him.

Then fell a blow upon Rome. The disaster of the battle of Pavia saw Francis I. make a league with the Sforza of Milan, Venice, Florence, and Pope Clement VII. against Charles v., which bred nothing but further disasters, ending in the renegade Connétable de Bourbon, with his horde of German and Spanish soldiers-of-fortune, taking [223] and pillaging Rome in 1527-the Pope being besieged for nine months in the Castle of Saint Angelo. The Florentines promptly shook off the rule of the Medici. Michelangelo flung himself with hot enthusiasm into the struggle for liberty. In the following year of 1528 he lost his favourite and beloved brother, Buonarroto, in the plague. A year thereafter Charles v. concluded the Peace of Barcelona with Pope Clement VII., making it a condition that the Pope should again set up the rule of the Medici over Florence. The citizens, preparing for a desperate resistance, made Michelangelo the Commissary-General of Defence, and it was the skill with which he fortified the city that enabled Florence to defy the attacks of the Imperial troops for a whole year, until the August of 1530, when the treachery of Malatesta Baglioni, their commander, brought about the fall of the city. On the return of Alessandro de' Medici in triumph to Florence, Michelangelo only saved his head by hiding in the bell-tower of San Nicolò beyond the Arno, until the fury of revenge was quieted. During the siege he had worked upon the tombs of the Medici for the sacristy, besides painting the panel of Leda and the Swan, which he gave to his pupil Antonio Mini, with many cartoons and drawings, as a dowry for his two sisters. Being sold to the King of France, it hung at Fontainebleau until Louis XIII.'s day, when one of the ministers ordered its destruction as an indecent picture, but it was said to have been hidden away.

The Pope's anger at the rebel sculptor soon cooled, and, thanks to the Papal envoy at Florence, Baccio Valori, to whom the grateful sculptor gave his statue of Apollo, now at Florence, Michelangelo was soon at work again upon the Medicean tombs. But, vexed by the troubles that ever dogged his sublime art, torn between Julius the Second's [224] nephew, the Duke of Urbino, who demanded the completion of the great Tomb, on the one hand, and Pope Clement VII., who vowed excommunication if he ceased work upon the Medicean tomb in the sacristy at Florence, he at any rate first finished the wondrous statue of the Madonna nursing the Child Christ, who is seen straddling across her knee.

The superb tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici for the sacristy at Florence, each of the princes arrayed like warriors of antiquity, seated in a niche above a sarcophagus on which two figures recline-Lorenzo in sorrowful meditation above the great reclining Evening and Dawn (the Dawn being finished in 1531, soon after the fall of Florence), Giuliano seated above the great reclining Night and Day-are amongst the mightiest achievements of all art. At their ending, in 1534, Michelangelo was to leave Florence, never to return. The figures of the Medicean tombs give forth his passionate love of liberty, his tragic longing for it, and his gloomy resentment at its loss to Florence, clear as though some vasty music sounded the tragic intensity of his feeling. His unfinished bust of Brutus in the Bargello repeats it-his proud and wide-ranging spirit, his independent and lofty soul irked by the petty tyrannies of Alessandro de' Medici.

Michelangelo was now on the edge of his sixtieth year. Raphael was dead fourteen years, Leonardo fifteen years, Andrea del Sarto three years, Correggio was to die in the following year. Michelangelo saw Italy in wreckage. He was to live through thirty more years and see worse befall. He saw Florence blotted out. He saw the Inquisition set up and the Italian spirit die under the heel of Spain.

He set foot in Rome again, to find that Pope Clement VII. [225] had been dead a couple of days, and that a Farnese, Paul III., had been elected in his stead. Michelangelo came to Rome under the bond to make the tomb of Julius II. of one façade only, using the marble already carved for the cube of the tomb, carving six statues by his own hand, and employing other artists to complete the rest of the work. Again he was to be balked. Paul III.-he of the cunning of a fox, who made himself infamous to indulge his vicious bastard son-at once made him chief architect, sculptor, and painter to the Vatican, and heedless of his prayers and beseechings, set him to the task of painting the end wall of the Sistine Chapel. The doors of the Sistine Chapel closed again upon Michelangelo, not to open again until the Christmas of 1541, when "to the admiration of Rome and the whole world " was uncovered his great Last Judgment. Baffled thirty-three years gone by, at thirty-three, in the full strength of early manhood, he had begun the painting of the great ceiling in the Sistine with the Creation ; at sixty-four, after seven or eight years' prodigious toil, he gave to the world, as the last act of the vast drama, the Doom of all created things-the Destiny that leads to the awful majesty of the Day of Wrath and Judgment, wrought with the gloomy tragic intensity of a Dante.

There is a grim irony in the fact that whilst the work was received with enthusiasm by the greatest artists of the age, the base and indecent scribbler, Pietro Aretino, should have led the enemies of the mighty genius to condemn it as indecent, owing to the number of its nudities ! Michelangelo refused to paint any draperies. And it is not the smallest part of the gross hypocrisy of the times that, a few years later, Paul IV. got Michelangelo to allow Daniele da Volterra partly to drape many of the figures-whereby that [226] worthy man rendered himself immortal by the nickname of "The Maker of Breeches-II Braghettone." The smoke of altar-candles has done its best to blacken the master's work, and blot out the shame of " The Maker of Breeches," but even though the majesty of it all shall perish, our Breeches Maker shall live-the slave of the hypocrisies of a wondrous age and as wondrous a people. So, as ever, we see society grow prude as it grows vicious. Yet one remembers with a thrill of pleasure how, the Pope's master of the ceremonies, one Biagio, playing the shocked censor, Michelangelo painted him into the Hell, and, the indignant man complaining, the Pope wittily replied that, had it been Purgatory, he might have helped him, but in Hell was no redemption.

Luigia de' Medici had been dead forty years when Michelangelo, in his sixties, met the second woman who was to leave a profound impression upon his life and soul. Vittoria Colonna was the first woman of her age. The friendship of these two great spirits, lofty in their ideals, impelled by mutual admiration and liking, was the source of much of Michelangelo's song-to her he poured out his passion in several of his finest sonnets, as at her death, when he wrote, " Her soul that quickened mine hath sought the skies." It was a strange platonic passion- strange as the life of the man. Vittoria Colonna was the daughter of Fabrizio Colonna, and the inconsolable widow of the Marquis of Pescara, and about forty-two years of age. She formed a circle of celebrities about her.