has been
grumbling here about my doings, I expect he will grumble there
also. Turn a deaf ear to him. It is enough. For he is a thousand
times in the wrong. I have good reason to complain of him. Take no
notice of him. Tell Buonarroto that I will reply to him another
time.

"The day twenty 7 of January.

"MICHAEL ANGELO, in Rome."(110)

[Image #20]

ATHLETE

SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME
(_By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence_)

Buggiardini appears to have fared better than L'Indaco. He painted a
portrait of Michael Angelo with a towel tied round his head like a turban,
now in the Casa Buonarroti, at Florence. From the age of the sitter it
appears to belong to this period; the towel may have been used to protect
the hair and head of the artist from falling colour as he painted the roof
above him. It is an energetic head, with jet black hair and sallow
complexion, with many lines and wrinkles for so young a face, determined,
sad, and scornful in expression; a slight weakness and affectation may be
due to the personality of the painter. Buggiardini also executed a
painting from the cartoon of the master, the Madonna and Child with
Angels, number 809, of the National Gallery. The beauty and grandeur of
the lines of this design are far above the imagination of any one except
Michael Angelo, but the details of the execution of the hands and the feet
are inferior to any authentic work of his. The hatchings in the shadows,
especially of the draperies, are made up of short and feeble lines, and do
not express the form of the folds at all in the same way as we are
accustomed to see Michael Angelo express them, even in his earlier
drawings, the copies from Giotto and the primitives. The form of the
mouths, and the expression and shape of the heads, especially in the
second angel on the right, are similar to the work of Buggiardini as seen
in Florence, Milan, and the Cathedral of Pisa. Buggiardini is the only one
of the assistants who seems to have reaped any benefit, beyond their
wages, from the work they did for the great master. This trouble with his
assistants was not the only difficulty that Michael Angelo had to contend
with in the execution of his work. Vasari says that he shut himself alone
in the chapel, without any one to help him even in the grin