in the very heart of mystical Florence--and sold
as an antique to Cardinal Riaro (1496)--of the large Cupid of the South
Kensington, of the Dying Adonis of the Museo Nazionale and of the
Drunken Bacchus which E. Guillaume calls the nearest to the antique of
all modern works. These last statues, made in Rome the very year of the
_Bruciamento delle Vanita_, when the Florentine "Piagnoni" danced in
fanatic zeal around bonfires of works of art, seem almost like a
defiance launched against the puritanism of Savonarola. His older
brother, Lionardo, a monk at Viterbo, who was forced to flee from his
monastery because of his Savonarolaist convictions, joined him in Rome
and Michelangelo gave him some money with which to return to Florence,
but he did not go with him. The ever-growing danger which threatened the
prophet and his followers did not draw him back to his country and
Savonarola's death--he was burnt in May, 1498--has not left a trace in
any of his letters.[9]

I do not mean to say that he was entirely untouched by that grand and
tragic drama. He was by nature silent and never spoke of what he felt
most deeply, and he was also prudent and afraid of compromising himself.
If Savonarola's ideas did have some influence on him it was at a later
time when, in his advanced age, under the influence of strong and deep
friendships, the disillusions of life and the fear of the hereafter,
religious preoccupations gained with him the place of first importance.
He was not among those who, like Botticelli, in 1498, consented to the
dethronement of the pagan pride of the Renaissance. Religious he
certainly was and a Christian as always, but his proud Christianity was
not that of the rest of the world. He was never understood by his own
time. Even when he was painting the Last Judgment, and his faith was
most ardent, he must have scandalised the devout. He was altogether a
Platonist. He could have said with Lorenzo de' Medici and his
illustrious friends of the gardens of S. Marco that "without studying
Plato one could neither be a good citizen nor an enlightened Christian."
Savonarola undoubtedly admired and loved Plato. Still he felt the object
of art to be religious edification and showed that ideal to artists in
"the face of a pious woman when she is praying, illuminated by a ray of
divine beauty."[10] Michelangelo despised that art made for the devout
and left it to the Flemings.[11] He had a horror of sentimentality and
almost of