es of the "Paradiso." This is true of all the highest
artistic natures, who need no preparations and have no period of groping.

Lorenzo de' Medici discerned in Michael Angelo a youth of eminent genius,
and took the lad into his own household. The astonished father found
himself suddenly provided with a comfortable post and courted for the sake
of the young sculptor. In Lorenzo's palace the real education of Michael
Angelo began. He sat at the same table with Ficino, Pico, and Poliziano,
listening to dialogues on Plato and drinking in the golden poetry of
Greece. Greek literature and philosophy, expounded by the men who had
discovered them, and who were no less proud of their discovery than
Columbus of his passage to the Indies, first moulded his mind to those
lofty thoughts which it became the task of his life to express in form. At
the same time he heard the preaching of Savonarola. In the Duomo and the
cloister of S. Marco another portion of his soul was touched, and he
acquired that deep religious tone which gives its majesty and terror to
the Sistine. Much in the same way was Milton educated by the classics in
conjunction with the Scriptures. Both of these austere natures assimilated
from pagan art and Jewish prophecy the twofold elements they needed for
their own imaginative life. Both Michael Angelo and Milton, in spite of
their parade of classic style, were separated from the Greek world by a
gulf of Hebrew and of Christian feeling.

While Michael Angelo was thus engaged in studying antique sculpture and in
listening to Pico and Savonarola, he carved his first bas-relief--a
"Battle of Hercules with the Centaurs," suggested to him by
Poliziano.[291] Meantime Lorenzo died. His successor Piero set the young
man, it is said, to model a snow statue, and then melted like a shape of
snow himself down from his pedestal of power in Florence. Upon the
expulsion of the tyrant and the proclamation of the new republic, it was
dangerous for house-friends of the Casa Medici to be seen in the city.
Michael Angelo, therefore, made his way to Bologna, where he spent some
months in the palace of Gian Francesco Aldovrandini, studying Dante and
working at an angel for the shrine of S. Dominic. As soon, however, as it
seemed safe to do so, he returned to Florence; and to this period belongs
the statue of the "Sleeping Cupid," which was sold as an antique to the
Cardinal Raffaello Riario.

A dispute about the price of this "Cupid" to