We can only take anecdotes for what they are worth, and that may perhaps be considered slight when they are anonymous.  This anecdote, however, in the original Florentine diction, although it betrays a partiality for Lionardo, bears the aspect of truth to fact.  Moreover, even Michelangelo’s admirers are bound to acknowledge that he had a rasping tongue, and was not incapable of showing his bad temper by rudeness.  From the period of his boyhood, when Torrigiano smashed his nose, down to the last years of his life in Rome, when he abused his nephew Lionardo and hurt the feelings of his best and oldest friends, he discovered signs of a highly nervous and fretful temperament.  It must be admitted that the dominant qualities of nobility and generosity in his nature were alloyed by suspicion bordering on littleness, and by petulant yieldings to the irritation of the moment which are incompatible with the calm of an Olympian genius.

CHAPTER V

I

While Michelangelo was living and working at Florence, Bramante had full opportunity to poison the Pope’s mind in Rome.  It is commonly believed, on the faith of a sentence in Condivi, that Bramante, when he dissuaded Julius from building the tomb in his own lifetime, suggested the painting of the Sistine Chapel.  We are told that he proposed Michelangelo for this work, hoping his genius would be hampered by a task for which he was not fitted.  There are many improbabilities in this story; not the least being our certainty that the fame of the Cartoon must have reached Bramante before Michelangelo’s arrival in the first months of 1505.  But the Cartoon did not prove that Buonarroti was a practical wall-painter or colourist; and we have reason to believe that Julius had himself conceived the notion of intrusting the Sistine to his sculptor.  A good friend of Michelangelo, Pietro Rosselli, wrote this letter on the subject, May 6, 1506:  “Last Saturday evening, when the Pope was at supper, I showed him some designs which Bramante and I had to test; so, after supper, when I had displayed them, he called for Bramante, and said:  ’San Gallo is going to Florence to-morrow, and will bring Michelangelo back with him.’  Bramante answered:  ’Holy Father, he will not be able to do anything of the kind.  I have conversed much with Michelangelo, and he has often told me that he would not undertake the chapel, which you wanted to put upon him; and that, you notwithstanding, he meant only to apply himself to sculpture, and would have nothing to do with painting.’  To this he added:  ’Holy Father, I do not think he has the courage to attempt the work, because he has small experience in painting figures, and these will be raised high above the line of vision, and in foreshortening (i.e., because of the vault).  That is something different from painting on the ground.’  The Pope replied:  ’If he does not come, he will do me wrong; and