VII

We are accustomed to think of Michelangelo as a self-withdrawn and solitary worker, living for his art, avoiding the conflict of society, immersed in sublime imaginings.  On the whole, this is a correct conception of the man.  Many passages of his biography will show how little he actively shared the passions and contentions of the stirring times through which he moved.  Yet his temperament exposed him to sudden outbursts of scorn and anger, which brought him now and then into violent collision with his neighbours.  An incident of this sort happened while he was studying under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and its consequences marked him physically for life.  The young artists whom the Magnificent gathered round him used to practise drawing in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine.  There Masaccio and his followers bequeathed to us noble examples of the grand style upon the frescoed panels of the chapel walls.  It was the custom of industrious lads to make transcripts from those broad designs, some of which Raphael deigned in his latest years to repeat, with altered manner, for the Stanze of the Vatican and the Cartoons.  Michelangelo went one day into the Carmine with Piero Torrigiano and other comrades.  What ensued may best be reported in the narration which Torrigiano at a later time made to Benvenuto Cellini.

“This Buonarroti and I used, when we were boys, to go into the Church of the Carmine to learn drawing from the chapel of Masaccio.  It was Buonarroti’s habit to banter all who were drawing there; and one day, when he was annoying me, I got more angry than usual, and, clenching my fist, I gave him such a blow on the nose that I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath my knuckles; and this mark of mine he will carry with him to the grave.”  The portraits of Michelangelo prove that Torrigiano’s boast was not a vain one.  They show a nose broken in the bridge.  But Torrigiano, for this act of violence, came to be regarded by the youth of Florence with aversion, as one who had laid sacrilegious hands upon the sacred ark.  Cellini himself would have wiped out the insult with blood.  Still Cellini knew that personal violence was not in the line of Michelangelo’s character; for Michelangelo, according to his friend and best biographer, Condivi, was by nature, “as is usual with men of sedentary and contemplative habits, rather timorous than otherwise, except when he is roused by righteous anger to resent unjust injuries or wrongs done to himself or others, in which case he plucks up more spirit than those who are esteemed brave; but, for the rest, he is most patient and enduring.”  Cellini, then, knowing the quality of Michelangelo’s temper, and respecting him as a deity of art, adds to his report of Torrigiano’s conversation:  “These words begat in me such hatred of the man, since I was always gazing at the masterpieces of the divine Michelangelo, that, although I felt a wish to go with him to England, I now could never bear the sight of him.”