IX

There was nothing peculiarly severe about the infirmities of Michelangelo’s old age.  We first hear of the dysuria from which he suffered, in 1548.  He writes to Lionardo thanking him for pears:  “I duly received the little barrel of pears you sent me.  There were eighty-six.  Thirty-three of them I sent to the Pope, who praised them as fine, and who enjoyed them.  I have lately been in great difficulty from dysuria.  However, I am better now.  And thus I write to you, chiefly lest some chatterbox should scribble a thousand lies to make you jump.”  In the spring of 1549 he says that the doctors believe he is suffering from calculus:  “The pain is great, and prevents me from sleeping.  They propose that I should try the mineral waters of Viterbo; but I cannot go before the beginning of May.  For the rest, as concerns my bodily condition, I am much the same as I was at thirty.  This mischief has crept upon me through the great hardships of my life and heedlessness.”  A few days later he writes that a certain water he is taking, whether mineral or medicine, has been making a beneficial change.  The following letters are very cheerful, and at length he is able to write:  “With regard to my disease, I am greatly improved in health, and have hope, much to the surprise of many; for people thought me a lost man, and so I believed.  I have had a good doctor, but I put more faith in prayers than I do in medicines.”  His physician was a very famous man, Realdo Colombo.  In the summer of the same year he tells Lionardo that he has been drinking for the last two months water from a fountain forty miles distant from Rome.  “I have to lay in a stock of it, and to drink nothing else, and also to use it in cooking, and to observe rules of living to which I am not used.”

Although the immediate danger from the calculus passed away, Michelangelo grew feebler yearly.  We have already seen how he wrote to Lionardo while Cosimo de’ Medici was urging him to come to Florence in 1557.  Passages in his correspondence with Lionardo like the following are frequent:  “Writing is the greatest annoyance to my hand, my sight, my brains.  So works old age!” “I go on enduring old age as well as I am able, with all the evils and discomforts it brings in its train; and I recommend myself to Him who can assist me.”  It was natural, after he had passed the ordinary term of life and was attacked with a disease so serious as the stone, that his thoughts should take a serious tone.  Thus he writes to Lionardo:  “This illness has made me think of setting the affairs of my soul and body more in order than I should have done.  Accordingly, I have drawn up a rough sketch of a will, which I will send you by the next courier if I am able, and you can tell me what you think.”  The will provided that Gismondo and Lionardo Buonarroti should be his joint-heirs, without the power of dividing the property.  This practically left Lionardo his