It is not quite easy to separate the records of these two acute illnesses of Michelangelo, falling between the summer of 1544 and the early spring of 1546.  Still, there is no doubt that they signalised his passage from robust old age into a period of physical decline.  Much of life survived in the hero yet; he had still to mould S. Peter’s after his own mind, and to invent the cupola.  Intellectually he suffered no diminution, but he became subject to a chronic disease of the bladder, and adopted habits suited to decaying faculty.

II

We have seen that Michelangelo regarded Luigi del Riccio as his most trusty friend and adviser.  The letters which he wrote to him during these years turn mainly upon business or poetical compositions.  Some, however, throw light upon the private life of both men, and on the nature of their intimacy.  I will select a few for special comment here.  The following has no date; but it is interesting, because we may connect the feeling expressed in it with one of Michelangelo’s familiar sonnets.  “Dear Messer Luigi, since I know you are as great a master of ceremonies as I am unfit for that trade, I beg you to help me in a little matter.  Monsignor di Todi (Federigo Cesi, afterwards Cardinal of S. Pancrazio) has made me a present, which Urbino will describe to you.  I think you are a friend of his lordship:  will you then thank him in my name, when you find a suitable occasion, and do so with those compliments which come easily to you, and to me are very hard?  Make me too your debtor for some tartlet.”

The sonnet is No. ix of Signor Guasti’s edition.  I have translated it thus:—­

  The sugar, candles, and the saddled mule,
    Together with your cask of malvoisie,
    So far exceed all my necessity
    That Michael and not I my debt must rule. 
  In such a glassy calm the breezes fool
    My sinking sails, so that amid the sea
    My bark hath missed her way, and seems to be
    A wisp of straw whirled on a weltering pool. 
  To yield thee gift for gift and grace for grace,
    For food and drink and carriage to and fro,
    For all my need in every time and place,
  O my dear lord, matched with the much I owe,
    All that I am were no real recompense: 
    Paying a debt is not munificence.

In the chapter upon Michelangelo’s poetry I dwelt at length upon Luigi del Riccio’s passionate affection for his cousin, Cecchino dei Bracci.  This youth died at the age of sixteen, on January 8, 1545.  Michelangelo undertook to design “the modest sepulchre of marble” erected to his memory by Del Riccio in the church of Araceli.  He also began to write sonnets, madrigals, and epitaphs, which were sent from day to day.  One of his letters gives an explanation of the eighth epitaph:  “Our dead friend speaks and says:  if the heavens robbed all beauty from all other men on earth to make me only, as indeed they made me, beautiful; and if by the divine decree I must return at doomsday to the shape I bore in life, it follows that I cannot give back the beauty robbed from others and bestowed on me, but that I must remain for ever more beautiful than the rest, and they be ugly.  This is just the opposite of the conceit you expressed to me yesterday; the one is a fable, the other is the truth.”