The influence of Dante over Buonarroti’s style of composition impressed his contemporaries.  Benedetto Varchi, in the proemium to a lecture upon one of Michelangelo’s poems, speaks of it as “a most sublime sonnet, full of that antique purity and Dantesque gravity.”  Dante’s influence over the great artist’s pictorial imagination is strongly marked in the fresco of the Last Judgment, where Charon’s boat, and Minos with his twisted tail, are borrowed direct from the Inferno. Condivi, moreover, informs us that the statues of the Lives Contemplative and Active upon the tomb of Julius were suggested by the Rachel and Leah of the Purgatorio. We also know that he filled a book with drawings illustrative of the “Divine Comedy.”  By a miserable accident this most precious volume, while in the possession of Antonio Montauti, the sculptor, perished at sea on a journey from Livorno to Rome.

But the strongest proof of Michelangelo’s reputation as a learned student of Dante is given in Donato Giannotti’s Dialogue upon the number of days spent by the poet during his journey through Hell and Purgatory.  Luigi del Riccio, who was a great friend of the sculptor’s, is supposed to have been walking one day toward the Lateran with Antonio Petreo.  Their conversation fell upon Cristoforo Landino’s theory that the time consumed by Dante in this transit was the whole of the night of Good Friday, together with the following day.  While engaged in this discussion, they met Donato Giannotti taking the air with Michelangelo.  The four friends joined company, and Petreo observed that it was a singular good fortune to have fallen that morning upon two such eminent Dante scholars.  Donato replied:  “With regard to Messer Michelangelo, you have abundant reason to say that he is an eminent Dantista, since I am acquainted with no one who understands him better and has a fuller mastery over his works.”  It is not needful to give a detailed account of Buonarroti’s Dantesque criticism, reported in these dialogues, although there are good grounds for supposing them in part to represent exactly what Giannotti heard him say.  This applies particularly to his able interpretation of the reason why Dante placed Brutus and Cassius in hell—­not as being the murderers of a tyrant, but as having laid violent hands upon the sacred majesty of the Empire in the person of Caesar.  The narrative of Dante’s journey through Hell and Purgatory, which is put into Michelangelo’s mouth, if we are to believe that he really made it extempore and without book, shows a most minute knowledge of the Inferno.

VII