Michelangelo’s chapel, called the New Sacristy, was begun for Leo X and finished for Giulio de’ Medici, illegitimate son of the murdered Giuliano and afterwards Pope Clement VII.  Brunelleschi’s design for the Old 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 painters in genius, was pre-eminently there in thoroughness, while he was good for the boy too in spirit, having a large way with him.  The first work of Ghirlandaio which the boy saw in the making was the beautiful “Adoration of the Magi,” in the Church of the Spedale degli Innocenti, completed in 1488, and the S. Maria Novella frescoes, and it is reasonable to suppose that he helped with the frescoes in colour grinding, even if he did not, as some have said, paint with his own hand the beggar sitting on the steps in the scene representing the “Presentation of the Virgin”.  That he was already clever with his pencil, we know, for he had made some caricatures and corrected a drawing or two.