ife and God's favor," as his father ordered.
Instead, he hid behind his mother's gown and made faces. His father used
to say he was about as homely as he could be without making faces, and if
he didn't watch out he would get his face crooked some day and couldn't
get it back.

Simone Buonarroti had qualities very Micawber-like mixed in his clay, and
the way he cringed and crawled may have had something to do with setting
the son on the other tack.

The mother was only nineteen when Michel was born, and although the
moralists talk much about woman's vanity and extravagance, the theory
gets no backing from this quarter. She was a plain woman in appearance,
quiet and self-contained, with no nerves to speak of, a sturdy, physical
endowment, and commonsense enough for two. When scarcely out of dresses
the boy began to draw pictures. He drew with charcoal on the walls, or
with a stick in the sand, and shaped curious things out of mud in the
gutters.

It was an age of creative art, and most of the work being in the churches
the common people had their part in it. In fact, the common people were
the artists. And when Simone Buonarroti found his twelve-year-old boy
haunting the churches to watch the workmen, and also discovered that he
was consorting with the youths who studied drawing in the atelier of
Ghirlandajo, he was displeased.

Painters, to this erstwhile nobleman, were simply men in blue blouses who
worked for low wages on high scaffolds, and occasionally spattered color
on the good clothes of ladies and gentlemen who were beneath. He didn't
really hate painters, he simply waived them; and to his mind there was no
difference between an artisan and an artist.

The mother, however, took a secret pride in her boy's drawings, as
mothers always do in a son's accomplishments. Doubtless she knew
something of the art of decoration, too, for she had brothers who worked
as day laborers on high scaffolds. Yet she didn't say much about it, for
women then didn't have so much to say about anything as now.

But I can imagine that this good woman, as she went daily to church to
pray, the year before her first child was born, watched the work of the
men on the scaffolds, and observed that day by day the pictures grew; and
as she looked, the sun streamed through stained windows and revealed to
her the miracles of form and color, and the impressions of "The
Annunciation," "Mary's Visit to Elizabeth" and "The Babe in the Manger"
fil