hat a great man can have on his time. At the moment of his
birth in the second half of the fifteenth century the serenity of
Ghirlandajo and of Bramante illuminated Italian art. Florentine
sculpture seemed about to languish away from an excess of grace in the
delicate and meticulous art of Rossellino, Disiderio, Mino da Fiesole,
Agostino di Duccio, Benedetto da Maiano and Andrea Sansovino.
Michelangelo burst like a thunder-storm into the heavy, overcharged sky
of Florence. This storm had undoubtedly been gathering for a long time
in the extraordinary intellectual and emotional tension of Italy which
was to cause the Savonarolist upheaval. Nothing like Michelangelo had
ever appeared before. He passed like a whirlwind, and after he had
passed the brilliant and sensual Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici and
Botticelli, of Verocchio and Lionardo, was ended forever. All that
harmonious living and dreaming, that spirit of analysis, that
aristocratic and courtly poetry, the whole elegant and subtle art of the
"Quattrocento," was swept away at one blow. Even after he had been gone
for a long time, the world of art was still whirled along in the eddies
of his wild spirit. Not the most remote corner was sheltered from the
tempest; it drew in its wake all the arts together. Michelangelo
captured painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry, all at once; he
breathed into them the frenzy of his vigour and of his overwhelming
idealism. No one understood him, yet all imitated him. Every one of his
great works, the David, the cartoon for the war against Pisa, the vault
of the Sistine Chapel, the Last Judgment, St. Peter's, dominated
generations of artists and enslaved them. From every one of these
creations radiated despotic power, a power that came above all from
Michelangelo's personality and from that tremendous life which covered
almost a century.

No one work can be detached from that life and studied separately. They
are all fragments of one monument, and the mistake that most historians
make is to mutilate this genius by dividing it into different pieces. We
must try to follow the entire course of the torrent from its beginning
to its end if we are to have any comprehension of its formidable unity.

MICHELANGELO

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

(1475-1505)

Michelangelo was born on the sixth of March, 1475, at Caprese, in
Casentino, of the ancient family of the Buonarroti-Simoni, who are
mentioned in the Floren