BENVENUTO. 
               But your old friends!

MICHAEL ANGELO. 
All dead by violence.  Baccio Valori
Has been beheaded; Guicciardini poisoned;
Philippo Strozzi strangled in his prison. 
Is Florence then a place for honest men
To flourish in?  What is there to prevent
My sharing the same fate?

BENVENUTO. 
                     Why this:  if all
Your friends are dead, so are your enemies.

MICHAEL ANGELO. 
Is Aretino dead?

BENVENUTO. 
                 He lives in Venice,
And not in Florence.

MICHAEL ANGELO. 
                 ’T is the same to me
This wretched mountebank, whom flatterers
Call the Divine, as if to make the word
Unpleasant in the mouths of those who speak it
And in the ears of those who hear it, sends me
A letter written for the public eye,
And with such subtle and infernal malice,
I wonder at his wickedness.  ’T is he
Is the express great devil, and not you. 
Some years ago he told me how to paint
The scenes of the Last Judgment.

BENVENUTO. 
                          I remember.

MICHAEL ANGELO. 
Well, now he writes to me that, as a Christian,
He is ashamed of the unbounded freedom
With which I represent it.

BENVENUTO. 
                          Hypocrite!

MICHAEL ANGELO. 
He says I show mankind that I am wanting
In piety and religion, in proportion
As I profess perfection in my art. 
Profess perfection?  Why, ’t is only men
Like Bugiardini who are satisfied
With what they do.  I never am content,
But always see the labors of my hand
Fall short of my conception.

BENVENUTO. 
                            I perceive
The malice of this creature.  He would taint you
With heresy, and in a time like this! 
’T is infamous!

MICHAEL ANGELO. 
                I represent the angels
Without their heavenly glory, and the saints
Without a trace of earthly modesty.

BENVENUTO. 
Incredible audacity!

MICHAEL ANGELO. 
                   The heathen
Veiled their Diana with some drapery,
And when they represented Venus naked
They made her by her modest attitude,
Appear half clothed.  But I, who am a Christian,
Do so subordinate belief to art
That I have made the very violation
Of modesty in martyrs and in virgins
A spectacle at which all men would gaze
With half-averted eyes even in a brothel.

BENVENUTO. 
He is at home there, and he ought to know
What men avert their eyes from in such places;
From the Last Judgment chiefly, I imagine.