“I should like you to be thoroughly convinced that all the labours I have ever undergone have not been more for myself than for your sake.  What I have bought, I bought to be yours so long as you live.  If you had not been here, I should have bought nothing.  Therefore, if you wish to let the house and farm, do so at your pleasure.  This income, together with what I shall give you, will enable you to live like a lord.”  At a time when Lodovico was much exercised in his mind and spirits by a lawsuit, his son writes to comfort the old man.  “Do not be discomfited, nor give yourself an ounce of sadness.  Remember that losing money is not losing one’s life.  I will more than make up to you what you must lose.  Yet do not attach too much value to worldly goods, for they are by nature untrustworthy.  Thank God that this trial, if it was bound to come, came at a time when you have more resources than you had in years past.  Look to preserving your life and health, but let your fortunes go to ruin rather than suffer hardships; for I would sooner have you alive and poor; if you were dead, I should not care for all the gold in the world.  If those chatterboxes or any one else reprove you, let them talk, for they are men without intelligence and without affection.”

References to public events are singularly scanty in this correspondence.  Much as Michelangelo felt the woes of Italy—­and we know he did so by his poems—­he talked but little, doing his work daily like a wise man all through the dust and din stirred up by Julius and the League of Cambrai.  The lights and shadows of Italian experience at that time are intensely dramatic.  We must not altogether forget the vicissitudes of war, plague, and foreign invasion, which exhausted the country, while its greatest men continued to produce immortal masterpieces.  Aldo Manuzio was quietly printing his complete edition of Plato, and Michelangelo was transferring the noble figure of a prophet or a sibyl to the plaster of the Sistine, while young Gaston de Foix was dying at the point of victory upon the bloody shores of the Ronco.  Sometimes, however, the disasters of his country touched Michelangelo so nearly that he had to write or speak about them.  After the battle of Ravenna, on the 11th of April 1512, Raimondo de Cardona and his Spanish troops brought back the Medici to Florence.  On their way, the little town of Prato was sacked with a barbarity which sent a shudder through the whole peninsula.  The Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who entered Florence on the 14th of September, established his nephews as despots in the city, and intimidated the burghers by what looked likely to be a reign of terror.  These facts account for the uneasy tone of a letter written by Michelangelo to Buonarroto.  Prato had been taken by assault upon the 30th of August, and was now prostrate after those hideous days of torment, massacre, and outrage indescribable which followed.  In these circumstances Michelangelo advises his family