aused by personal
discomforts, mean living, and penurious habits. As I said, economy is
good; but, above all things, shun stinginess. Live discreetly well,
and see you have what is needful. Whatever happens, do not expose
yourself to physical hardships; for in your profession, if you were
once to fall ill (which God forbid), you would be a ruined man. Above
all things, take care of your head, and keep it moderately warm, and
see that you never wash: have yourself rubbed down, but do not wash."
This sordid way of life became habitual with Michelangelo. When he was
dwelling at Bologna in 1506, he wrote home to his brother Buonarroto:
"With regard to Giovan-Simone's proposed visit, I do not advise him to
come yet awhile, for I am lodged here in one wretched room, and have
bought a single bed, in which we all four of us (_i.e_., himself and
his three workmen) sleep." And again: "I am impatient to get away from
this place, for my mode of life here is so wretched, that if you only
knew what it is, you would be miserable." The summer was intensely hot
at Bologna, and the plague broke out. In these circumstances it seems
miraculous that the four sculptors in one bed escaped contagion.
Michelangelo's parsimonious habits were not occasioned by poverty or
avarice. He accumulated large sums of money by his labour, spent it
freely on his family, and exercised bountiful charity for the welfare
of his soul. We ought rather to ascribe them to some constitutional
peculiarity, affecting his whole temperament, and tinging his
experience with despondency and gloom. An absolute insensibility to
merely decorative details, to the loveliness of jewels, stuffs, and
natural objects, to flowers and trees and pleasant landscapes, to
everything, in short, which delighted the Italians of that period, is
a main characteristic of his art. This abstraction and aridity, this
ascetic devotion of his genius to pure ideal form, this almost
mathematical conception of beauty, may be ascribed, I think, to the
same psychological qualities which determined the dreary conditions of
his home-life. He was no niggard either of money or of ideas; nay,
even profligate of both. But melancholy made him miserly in all that
concerned personal enjoyment; and he ought to have been born under
that leaden planet Saturn rather than Mercury and Venus in the house
of Jove. Condivi sums up his daily habits thus: "He has always been
extremely temperate in living, using food more b