ed talent!

Battista Franco of Venice, _il Semolei_ distinguished himself above all
others by his zeal in copying Michelangelo. Vasari says that there was
not a sketch, not the roughest note, or any sort of fragment of his
which he had not devoutly drawn. He knew the whole Sistine by heart. In
1536 he came to Florence and drew once more all the statues of S.
Lorenzo. In 1541 he hurried to Rome for the "premiere" of the Last
Judgment, and he made a drawing of the whole thing "_con infinita
maraviglia il designo tutto_." We can understand that he had no time to
do any thinking for himself. For a long time he refrained from painting
anything of his own. When he decided to begin it was to reproduce in
his Battle of Montemurlo some fragments of the war against Pisa or of
the Rape of Ganymede.[151]

The independent Cellini writes in his memoirs: "I devoted myself
continually to trying to absorb thoroughly the beautiful style of
Michelangelo, and since then I have never departed from it."

A hundred years later still Bernini copied the Last Judgment for two
successive years before he began to draw from nature. Scivoli watched
him doing it and said: "Sei un furbo; no fai quel che vedi: questa e di
Michelangelo." ("You are a fool. You are not drawing what you see; this
is nothing but Michelangelo").[152]

Bernini, who tells of this, does not see that it is a criticism, for he
recommends this same system of education to young artists.

"It is necessary first for a young man to form an idea of the beautiful,
for this is of use to him all his life; it ruins young men to begin by
drawing from nature, which is almost always weak and mean, and which
then fills their imagination, so that they can never produce anything
beautiful or great, qualities which are never found in natural things.
Those who make use of nature should be already skilful enough to
recognise its faults and to correct them. A young man is not capable of
this until he has gained full knowledge of beauty."[153]

The essential idea of this teaching was that nature is evil; just what
Michelangelo thought. But we now see to what unexpected results his
pessimistic idealism led. It produced not only separation from nature,
but renunciation of personal feeling for formulas, "since it is not
possible for one individual to have light on all subjects nor to grasp
without assistance the difficulty of arts so profound and so little
understood."

What would Michelangelo h