d Sacristy was followed but made more severe. This, one
would feel to be the very home of dead princes even if there were no
statues. The only colours are the white of the walls and the brown
of the pillars and windows; the dome was to have been painted, but
it fortunately escaped.

The contrast between Michelangelo's dome and Brunelleschi's is
complete--Brunelleschi's so suave and gentle in its rise, with its
grey lines to help the eye, and this soaring so boldly to its lantern,
with its rigid device of dwindling squares. The odd thing is that
with these two domes to teach him better the designer of the Chapel
of the Princes should have indulged in such floridity.

Such is the force of the architecture in the sacristy that one is
profoundly conscious of being in melancholy's most perfect home;
and the building is so much a part of Michelangelo's life and it
contains such marvels from his hand that I choose it as a place
to tell his story. Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6th,
1475, at Caprese, of which town his father was Podesta. At that time
Brunelleschi had been dead twenty-nine years, Fra Angelico twenty
years, Donatello nine years, Leonardo da Vinci was twenty-three years
old, and Raphael was not yet born. Lorenzo the Magnificent had been
on what was virtually the throne of Florence since 1469 and was a
young man of twenty-six. For foster-mother the child had the wife
of a stone-mason at Settignano, whither the family soon moved, and
Michelangelo used to say that it was with her milk that he imbibed
the stone-cutting art. It was from the air too, for Settignano's
principal industry was sculpture. The village being only three miles
from Florence, from it the boy could see the city very much as we see
it now--its Duomo, its campanile, with the same attendant spires. He
was sent to Florence to school and intended for either the wool or silk
trade, as so many Florentines were; but displaying artistic ability,
he induced his father to apprentice him, at the age of thirteen, to
a famous goldsmith and painter of Florence who had a busy atelier--no
other than Domenico Ghirlandaio, who was then a man of thirty-nine.

Michelangelo remained with him for three years, and although his
power and imagination were already greater than his master's, he
learned much, and would never have made his Sixtine Chapel frescoes
with the ease he did but for this early grounding. For Ghirlandaio,
although not of the first rank of