The terms of his apprenticeship called for three years, but after he had been at work a year, the ability of the youth made such an impression on the master that he took him to Lorenzo, Lorenzo the Magnificent, who then ruled over Florence.

Lorenzo had him draw a few sketches, and he was admitted to the Academy.  This “Academy” was situated in the palace of Lorenzo, and in the gardens was a rich collection of antique marbles:  busts, columns, and valuable fragments that had come down from the days when Pericles did for Athens what Lorenzo was then doing for Florence.  The march of commerce has overrun the garden, but in the Uffizi Gallery are to be seen today most of the curios that Lorenzo collected.

By introducing the lad to Lorenzo, Ghirlandajo lost his best helper, but so unselfish was this excellent master that he seemed quite willing to forego his own profit that the boy might have the best possible advantages.  And I never think of Ghirlandajo without mentally lifting my hat.

At the Academy, Michelangelo ceased to paint and draw, and devoted all his energies to modeling in clay.  So intent was his application that in a few weeks he had mastered technicalities that took others years to comprehend.

One day the father came and found the boy in a blouse at work with mallet and chisel on a block of marble.  “And is it a stone-mason you want to make of my heir and firstborn?” asked the fond father.

It was explained that there were stone-masons and stone-masons.  A stone-mason of transcendent skill is a sculptor, just as a painter who can produce a beautiful picture is an artist.

Simone Buonarroti acknowledged he had never looked at it just in that way, but still he would not allow his son to remain at the trade unless—­unless he himself had an office under the government.

Lorenzo gave him the desired office, and took the young stone-mason as one of the Medici family, and there the boy lived in the Palace, and Lorenzo acted toward him as though he were his son.

The favor with which he was treated excited the envy of some of the other pupils, and thus it was that in sudden wrath Torrigiano struck him that murderous blow with the mallet.  Torrigiano paid for his fierce temper, not only by expulsion from the Academy, but by banishment from Florence.

Michelangelo was the brightest of the hundred young men who worked and studied at the Medici palace.

But when this head scholar was eighteen Lorenzo died.  The son of Lorenzo continued his father’s work in a feeble way, for Piero de Medici was a good example of the fact that great men seldom reproduce themselves after the flesh.  Piero had about as much comprehension of the beautiful as the elder Buonarroti.  He thought that all these young men who were being educated at the Academy would eventually be valuable adjuncts to the State, and as such it was a good scheme to give each a trade—­besides, it kept them off the street; and then the work was amusing, a diversion to the nobility when time hung heavy.