A pleasant thread runs through Michelangelo’s correspondence during these years.  It is the affection he felt for his workman Pietro Urbano.  When he leaves the young man behind him at Florence, he writes frequently, giving him advice, bidding him mind his studies, and also telling him to confess.  It happened that Urbano fell ill at Carrara, toward the end of August.  Michelangelo, on hearing the news, left Florence and travelled by post to Carrara.  Thence he had his friend transported on the backs of men to Serravezza, and after his recovery sent him to pick up strength in his native city of Pistoja.  In one of the Ricordi he reckons the cost of all this at 33-1/2 ducats.

While Michelangelo was residing at Pietra Santa in 1518, his old friend and fellow-worker, Pietro Rosselli, wrote to him from Rome, asking his advice about a tabernacle of marble which Pietro Soderini had ordered.  It was to contain the head of S. John the Baptist, and to be placed in the Church of the Convent of S. Silvestro.  On the 7th of June Soderini wrote upon the same topic, requesting a design.  This Michelangelo sent in October, the execution of the shrine being intrusted to Federigo Frizzi.  The incident would hardly be worth mentioning, except for the fact that it brings to mind one of Michelangelo’s earliest patrons, the good-hearted Gonfalonier of Justice, and anticipates the coming of the only woman he is known to have cared for, Vittoria Colonna.  It was at S. Silvestro that she dwelt, retired in widowhood, and here occurred those Sunday morning conversations of which Francesco d’Olanda has left us so interesting a record.

During the next year, 1519, a certain Tommaso di Dolfo invited him to visit Adrianople.  He reminded him how, coming together in Florence, when Michelangelo lay there in hiding from Pope Julius, they had talked about the East, and he had expressed a wish to travel into Turkey.  Tommaso di Dolfo dissuaded him on that occasion, because the ruler of the province was a man of no taste and careless about the arts.  Things had altered since, and he thought there was a good opening for an able sculptor.  Things, however, had altered in Italy also, and Buonarroti felt no need to quit the country where his fame was growing daily.

Considerable animation is introduced into the annals of Michelangelo’s life at this point by his correspondence with jovial Sebastiano del Piombo.  We possess one of this painter’s letters, dating as early as 1510, when he thanks Buonarroti for consenting to be godfather to his boy Luciano; a second of 1512, which contains the interesting account of his conversation with Pope Julius about Michelangelo and Raffaello; and a third, of 1518, turning upon the rivalry between the two great artists.  But the bulk of Sebastiano’s gossipy and racy communications belongs to the period of thirteen years between 1520 and 1533; then it suddenly breaks off, owing to Michelangelo’s having taken