An ecclesiastic standing near officiously begged his Holiness not to be
too severe with Michael Angelo, as he was a man of no education, and as
artists did not know how to behave except where their own art was
concerned.
The pope was now fully angry, and exclaimed, "Do you venture to say
things to this man which I would not have said to him myself? You are
yourself a man of no education, a miserable fellow, and this he is not.
Leave our presence." The man was borne out of the hall, nearly fainting.
Michael Angelo was at once commissioned to make a bronze statue of
Julius, fourteen feet high, to be placed before the Church of St.
Petronio, in Bologna. When the pope wished to know the cost, the artist
told him he thought it would be about three thousand ducats, but was not
sure whether the cast would succeed.
"You will mould it until it succeeds," said the pope, "and you shall be
paid as much as you require."
When the clay model was ready for the pope to look at, he was asked if
he would like to be represented holding a book in his left hand.
"Give me a sword!" he exclaimed; "I am no scholar. And what does the
raised right hand denote? Am I dispensing a curse, or a blessing?"
"You are advising the people of Bologna to be wise," replied Michael
Angelo.
The bronze statue was a difficult work. The first cast was unsuccessful.
The sculptor wrote home, "If I had a second time to undertake this
intense work, which gives me no rest night or day, I scarcely think I
should be able to accomplish it. I am convinced that no one else upon
whom this immense task might have been imposed would have persevered. My
belief is that your prayers have kept me sustained and well. For no one
in Bologna, not even after the successful issue of the cast, thought
that I should finish the statue satisfactorily; before that no one
thought that the cast would succeed."
After the statue was completed, Michael Angelo, at the earnest request
of the helpless Buonarotti family, went back to Florence, and carried
there what he had earned. Grimm naïvely remarks, "I could almost suppose
that it had been designed by Fate, as may be often observed in similar
cases, to compensate for Michael Angelo's extraordinary gifts by a
corresponding lack of them in the family." The case of Galileo,
struggling through life for helpless relatives, is similar to that of
Michael Angelo.
He was soon summoned again to Rome, not to complete the monument, as he
had hoped, but to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He hesitated
to undertake so important a work in painting, and begged that Raphael be
chosen; but the pope would not consent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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