In this book it is our task to study the artist in relation to the masters of money; and we shall find no more tragic illustrations of the waste that is wrought in the life of genius by the powers of greed, than are revealed to us in the story of Michelangelo Buonarroti. He is ranked as one of the greatest sculptors of all time; he was also one of the greatest of painters, and a great poet. Like most of those who have visioned the sublime and the colossal, he was a man of frail physique, fear-haunted all his life. As a child he was beaten by his father, who sought to break him of the desire to become an artist. At the age of nine he was taken to hear the thunderings of Savonarola, another frail prophet who had arisen to denounce the vices of the church in Florence. When Michelangelo was twenty-three, Savonarola was publicly hanged, after having been excommunicated by the Borgia pope. The young painter at that time was beguiling himself with Greek beauty; but the terrible fate of the prophet cannot have failed to impress him, and helps to account for the religious fervors of his later years. Two worlds struggled in his soul, the world of pagan beauty and luxurious pleasure, and the world of heavenly raptures and fanatical asceticism. This artist’s abilities were quickly recognized. The same pope, Julius II, who was showering Raphael with golden ducats, adopted Michelangelo as his chief glorifier, and the two of them spent a year or two preparing colossal plans for the pope’s tomb, something greater than any tomb ever seen on earth before, a perfect mountain of marble, with more than forty statues of colossal size. Here we see Michelangelo’s fate; one of the great masters of life, with a mighty message concerning the destiny of man, he is obliged to get the money by which he lives, and the marble which he carves, from a vain and greedy politician in churchly raiment. He is permitted to make statues of David and of Moses, of Day and Night and Morning and Evening, and other great symbolic ideas; but he must carve them for the tomb of some pope or potentate, and must spend the greater part of his life in quarreling--not merely with this pope or potentate, but with officials and subordinates, all hating, intriguing, threatening to stab or to poison.