Michelangelo left Florence in June, 1496. He went to Rome and in that town so full of classic memories he absorbed himself in classic works. It is fair to say that he was never so pagan as from 1492 to 1497, the years during which the tragedy of Savonarola was enacted. This is the period of the colossal Hercules[8] in marble (1492), of the famous sleeping Cupid, wrought in the very heart of mystical Florence--and sold as an antique to Cardinal Riaro (1496)--of the large Cupid of the South Kensington, of the Dying Adonis of the Museo Nazionale and of the Drunken Bacchus which E. Guillaume calls the nearest to the antique of all modern works. These last statues, made in Rome the very year of the _Bruciamento delle Vanità_, when the Florentine "Piagnoni" danced in fanatic zeal around bonfires of works of art, seem almost like a defiance launched against the puritanism of Savonarola. His older brother, Lionardo, a monk at Viterbo, who was forced to flee from his monastery because of his Savonarolaist convictions, joined him in Rome and Michelangelo gave him some money with which to return to Florence, but he did not go with him. The ever-growing danger which threatened the prophet and his followers did not draw him back to his country and Savonarola's death--he was burnt in May, 1498--has not left a trace in any of his letters.[9] I do not mean to say that he was entirely untouched by that grand and tragic drama. He was by nature silent and never spoke of what he felt most deeply, and he was also prudent and afraid of compromising himself. If Savonarola's ideas did have some influence on him it was at a later time when, in his advanced age, under the influence of strong and deep friendships, the disillusions of life and the fear of the hereafter, religious preoccupations gained with him the place of first importance. He was not among those who, like Botticelli, in 1498, consented to the dethronement of the pagan pride of the Renaissance. Religious he certainly was and a Christian as always, but his proud Christianity was not that of the rest of the world. He was never understood by his own time. Even when he was painting the Last Judgment, and his faith was most ardent, he must have scandalised the devout. He was altogether a Platonist. He could have said with Lorenzo de' Medici and his illustrious friends of the gardens of S. Marco that "without studying Plato one could neither be a good citizen nor an enlightened Christian." Savonarola undoubtedly admired and loved Plato. Still he felt the object of art to be religious edification and showed that ideal to artists in "the face of a pious woman when she is praying, illuminated by a ray of divine beauty."[10] Michelangelo despised that art made for the devout and left it to the Flemings.[11] He had a horror of sentimentality and almost of sentiment. "True painting," he said, "never will make any one shed a tear."[12]