Live discreetly well, and see you have what is needful.  Whatever happens, do not expose yourself to physical hardships; for in your profession, if you were once to fall ill (which God forbid), you would be a ruined man.  Above all things, take care of your head, and keep it moderately warm, and see that you never wash:  have yourself rubbed down, but do not wash.”  This sordid way of life became habitual with Michelangelo.  When he was dwelling at Bologna in 1506, he wrote home to his brother Buonarroto:  “With regard to Giovan-Simone’s proposed visit, I do not advise him to come yet awhile, for I am lodged here in one wretched room, and have bought a single bed, in which we all four of us (i.e., himself and his three workmen) sleep.”  And again:  “I am impatient to get away from this place, for my mode of life here is so wretched, that if you only knew what it is, you would be miserable.”  The summer was intensely hot at Bologna, and the plague broke out.  In these circumstances it seems miraculous that the four sculptors in one bed escaped contagion.  Michelangelo’s parsimonious habits were not occasioned by poverty or avarice.  He accumulated large sums of money by his labour, spent it freely on his family, and exercised bountiful charity for the welfare of his soul.  We ought rather to ascribe them to some constitutional peculiarity, affecting his whole temperament, and tinging his experience with despondency and gloom.  An absolute insensibility to merely decorative details, to the loveliness of jewels, stuffs, and natural objects, to flowers and trees and pleasant landscapes, to everything, in short, which delighted the Italians of that period, is a main characteristic of his art.  This abstraction and aridity, this ascetic devotion of his genius to pure ideal form, this almost mathematical conception of beauty, may be ascribed, I think, to the same psychological qualities which determined the dreary conditions of his home-life.  He was no niggard either of money or of ideas; nay, even profligate of both.  But melancholy made him miserly in all that concerned personal enjoyment; and he ought to have been born under that leaden planet Saturn rather than Mercury and Venus in the house of Jove.  Condivi sums up his daily habits thus:  “He has always been extremely temperate in living, using food more because it was necessary than for any pleasure he took in it; especially when he was engaged upon some great work; for then he usually confined himself to a piece of bread, which he ate in the middle of his labour.  However, for some time past, he has been living with more regard to health, his advanced age putting this constraint upon his natural inclination.  Often have I heard him say:  ’Ascanio, rich as I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man.’  And this abstemiousness in food he has practised in sleep also; for sleep, according to his own account, rarely suits his constitution, since he continually suffers from pains in the head