Michael Angelo belonged to that city and to those days, with all their prejudices, passions, and feverish life.
Certainly he was not tender towards his compatriots. With his broad-chested, open-air genius, he despised their narrow artistic outlook, their pretentious intellect, their dull realism, their sentimentalism, and their morbid subtlety. He handled them roughly; but he loved them nevertheless. As regards his native place, he did not possess Leonardo's smiling indifference. When far from Florence he was consumed with home-sickness.[1] During his whole life he wore himself out in vain efforts to live there. He was in Florence in the tragic hour of war; and it was his desire "to return there at least when dead, since he had been unable to do so when alive."[2]
Old Florentine that he was, he was filled with the pride of his blood and his race.[3] He was prouder of his
- ↑ "From time to time I fall into a state of great melancholy, as happens to those who are far from their home." (Letter of August 19, 1497, Rome.)
- ↑ He was thinking of himself when he made his friend, Cecchino dei Bracci, one of the banished Florentines who lived in Rome, say: "Death is dear to me, since I shall owe it the happiness of returning to my native place, which was closed to me whilst I was alive." ("Poems of Michael Angelo," Carl Frey's edition, lxxiii. 24.)
- ↑ The Buonarroti Simoni, natives of Settignano, are mentioned in the Florentine chronicles from the twelfth century, and Michael Angelo was well aware of this. He knew hisgenealogy. "We are citizens of the noblest race," he wrote in a letter of December 1546, to his nephew Leonardo. He became indignant at the idea that his nephew should think of joining the ranks of the nobility. "You show a lack of self-respect," he said. "Everyone knows that we belong to the old burgesses of Florence, and are as noble as any one." (February 1549.) He endeavored to restore his family's fallen fortunes, to revive their old name of Simoni, and to establish a patrician house in Florence. But
