should become a
Museum of Italian art, where all painters of eminence could deposit
proofs of their ability, until each square foot of wall was covered
with competing masterpieces. But when Michelangelo heard of Bramante's
intrigues, he was greatly disturbed in spirit. Having begun his task
unwillingly, he now felt an equal or greater unwillingness to leave
the stupendous conception of his brain unfinished. Against all
expectation of himself and others, he had achieved a decisive victory,
and was placed at one stroke, Condivi says, "above the reach of envy."
His hand had found its cunning for fresco as for marble. Why should he
be interrupted in the full swing of triumphant energy? "Accordingly,
he sought an audience with the Pope, and openly laid bare all the
persecutions he had suffered from Bramante, and discovered the
numerous misdoings of the man." It was on this occasion, according to
Condivi, that Michelangelo exposed Bramante's scamped work and
vandalism at S. Peter's. Julius, who was perhaps the only man in Rome
acquainted with his sculptor's scheme for the Sistine vault, brushed
the cobwebs of these petty intrigues aside, and left the execution of
the whole to Michelangelo.

There is something ignoble in the task of recording rivalries and
jealousies between artists and men of letters. Genius, however, like
all things that are merely ours and mortal, shuffles along the path of
life, half flying on the wings of inspiration, half hobbling on the
feet of interest the crutches of commissions. Michelangelo, although
he made the David and the Sistine, had also to make money. He was
entangled with shrewd men of business, and crafty spendthrifts,
ambitious intriguers, folk who used undoubted talents, each in its
kind excellent and pure, for baser purposes of gain or getting on. The
art-life of Rome seethed with such blood-poison; and it would be
sentimental to neglect what entered so deeply and so painfully into
the daily experience of our hero. Raffaello, kneaded of softer and
more facile clay than Michelangelo, throve in this environment, and
was somehow able--so it seems--to turn its venom to sweet uses. I like
to think of the two peers, moving like stars on widely separated
orbits, with radically diverse temperaments, proclivities, and habits,
through the turbid atmosphere enveloping but not obscuring their
lucidity. Each, in his own way, as it seems to me, contrived to keep
himself unspotted by the world; and if