it not for a trifling proturberance in the middle.  The eyebrows are not thick with hair; the eyes may even be called small, of a colour like horn, but speckled and stained with spots of bluish yellow.  The ears in good proportion; hair of the head black, as also the beard, except that both are now grizzled by old age; the beard double-forked, about five inches long, and not very bushy, as may partly be observed in his portrait.”

We have no contemporary account of Michelangelo in early manhood; but the tenor of his life was so even, and, unlike Cellini, he moved so constantly upon the same lines and within the same sphere of patient self-reserve, that it is not difficult to reconstruct the young and vigorous sculptor out of this detailed description by his loving friend and servant in old age.  Few men, notably few artists, have preserved that continuity of moral, intellectual, and physical development in one unbroken course which is the specific characterisation of Michelangelo.  As years advanced, his pulses beat less quickly and his body shrank.  But the man did not alter.  With the same lapse of years, his style grew drier and more abstract, but it did not alter in quality or depart from its ideal.  He seems to me in these respects to be like Milton:  wholly unlike the plastic and assimilative genius of a Raphael.

CHAPTER III

I

Michelangelo returned to Florence in the spring of 1501.  Condivi says that domestic affairs compelled him to leave Rome, and the correspondence with his father makes this not improbable.  He brought a heightened reputation back to his native city.  The Bacchus and the Madonna della Febbre had placed him in advance of any sculptor of his time.  Indeed, in these first years of the sixteenth century he may be said to have been the only Tuscan sculptor of commanding eminence.  Ghiberti, Della Quercia, Brunelleschi, Donatello, all had joined the majority before his birth.  The second group of distinguished craftsmen—­Verocchio, Luca della Robbia, Rossellino, Da Maiano, Civitali, Desiderio da Settignano—­expired at the commencement of the century.  It seemed as though a gap in the ranks of plastic artists had purposely been made for the entrance of a predominant and tyrannous personality.  Jacopo Tatti, called Sansovino, was the only man who might have disputed the place of preeminence with Michelangelo, and Sansovino chose Venice for the theatre of his life-labours.  In these circumstances, it is not singular that commissions speedily began to overtax the busy sculptor’s power of execution.  I do not mean to assert that the Italians, in the year 1501, were conscious of Michelangelo’s unrivalled qualities, or sensitive to the corresponding limitations which rendered these qualities eventually baneful to the evolution of the arts; but they could not help feeling that in this young man of twenty-six they possessed a first-rate craftsman, and one who had no peer among contemporaries.