re to resume the main points of the indictment
brought against Michelangelo's sanity by the neo-psychologists. In the
first place, he admired male more than female beauty, and preferred
the society of men to that of women. But this peculiarity, in an age
and climate which gave larger licence to immoderate passions, exposed
him to no serious malignancy of rumour. Such predilections were not
uncommon in Italy. They caused scandal when they degenerated into
vice, and rarely failed in that case to obscure the good fame of
persons subject to them. Yet Michelangelo, surrounded by jealous
rivals, was only very lightly touched by the breath of calumny in his
lifetime. Aretino's malicious insinuation and Condivi's cautious
vindication do not suffice to sully his memory with any dark
suspicion. He lived with an almost culpable penuriousness in what
concerned his personal expenditure. But he was generous towards his
family, bountiful to his dependants, and liberal in charity. He
suffered from constitutional depression, preferred solitude to crowds,
and could not brook the interference of fashionable idlers with his
studious leisure. But, as he sensibly urged in self-defence, these
eccentricities, so frequent with men of genius, ought to have been
ascribed to the severe demands made upon an artist's faculties by the
problems with which he was continually engaged; the planning of a
Pope's mausoleum, the distribution of a score of histories and several
hundreds of human figures on a chapel-vaulting, the raising of S.
Peter's cupola in air: none of which tasks can be either lightly
undertaken or carried out with ease. At worst, Michelangelo's
melancholy might be ascribed to that _morbus eruditorum_ of which
Burton speaks. It never assumed the form of hypochondria,
hallucination, misogyny, or misanthropy. He was irritable, suspicious,
and frequently unjust both to his friends and relatives on slight
occasions. But his relatives gave him good reason to be fretful by
their greediness, ingratitude, and stupidity; and when he lost his
temper he recovered it with singular ease. It is also noticeable that
these paroxysms of crossness on which so much stress has been laid,
came upon him mostly when he was old, worn out with perpetual mental
and physical fatigue, and troubled by a painful disease of the
bladder. There is nothing in their nature, frequency, or violence to
justify the hypothesis of more than a hyper-sensitive nervous
temperament