Before this epoch closed, the two greatest heroes of Florentine art
had appeared upon the scenes, but their great work lay still in the
future. Leonardo da Vinci (born in 1452) had learned to paint in the
school of Verrocchio; but painting was to occupy but a small portion
of his time and labour. His mind roamed freely over every field of
human activity, and plunged deeply into every sphere of human thought;
nor is he adequately represented even by the greatest of the pictures
that he has left. There is nothing of him now in Florence, save a few
drawings in the Uffizi and an unfinished picture of the Epiphany.
Leonardo finished little, and, with that little, time and man have
dealt hardly. Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in the Casentino in
1475, and nurtured among the stone quarries of Settignano. At the age
of thirteen, his father apprenticed him to the Ghirlandaii, Domenico
and his brother David; and, with his friend and fellow-student,
Francesco Granacci, the boy began to frequent the gardens of the
Medici, near San Marco, where in the midst of a rich collection of
antiquities Donatello's pupil and successor, Bertoldo, directed a kind
of Academy. Here Michelangelo attracted the attention of Lorenzo
himself, by the head of an old satyr which he had hammered out of a
piece of marble that fell to his hand; and the Magnifico took him into
his household. This youthful period in the great master's career was
occupied in drinking in culture from the Medicean circle, in studying
the antique and, of the moderns, especially the works of Donatello and
Masaccio. But, with the exception of a few early fragments from his
hand, Michelangelo's work commenced with his first visit to Rome, in
1496, and belongs to the following epoch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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