even more valuable there in the friendship of the prince and of the élite of the Florentine thinkers. Lorenzo took an interest in him, lodged him in the palace and admitted him to his son's table, and in this way Michelangelo found himself at the very heart of the Renaissance, in the midst of the humanists and the poets and in intimate relation with all whom Italy counted most noble; with Pico della Mirandola, with Pulci, Benevieni and especially with Poliziano, "who loved him greatly and urged him to study, although that was hardly necessary."[7]

Surrounded by this atmosphere of lofty paganism he became intoxicated with the classic idea and became himself a pagan; he made the heroic forms of Greece live again while putting into them his own savage vigour. Following the suggestions of Poliziano{8} he wrought the bas-relief of the Combat of the Centaurs and the Lapithæ of the Casa Buonarroti, in which the figures are athletic and struggling and the faces impassive and proud. He carved the bestial face of the Laughing Satyr with its violent and strained expression as of one who was not used to laughter, and a little later the relief of Apollo and Marsyas.

Nevertheless this paganism did not touch his Christian faith at all. The struggle that was to endure almost all his life had already begun within him between those two hostile worlds which he vainly tried to reconcile. In 1489 and 1490 Savonarola began in Florence his fiery sermons on the Apocalypse and Michelangelo went to hear them with all the rest of Lorenzo's circle. He had been brought up very religiously by his father, a kind, God-fearing man of the old style, and his brother Lionardo in 1491, under the influence of Savonarola, entered the Monastery of the Dominicans at Pisa.

He could not remain indifferent to the burning words of a prophet who was like an elder brother of the prophets of the Sistine and whose sombre visions and fiery purity must have pierced the heart of the youth who listened to the preaching in S. Marco or the Duomo. I am convinced, nevertheless, that historians have very much exaggerated the effect{9} of this influence on Michelangelo. In the beginning he certainly did not feel very strongly the heroic grandeur of the frail little preacher who from his high pulpit launched his lightnings against pope and princes. His first impression seems to have been almost entirely one of terror; he did not escape from the contagion of fear which seized the entire city at the thunder of the gloomy prophecies which held the bloody sword of God suspended over Italy and which filled the streets of Florence with people weeping madly. When at last there came the new Cyrus, foretold by the monk of S. Marco, Charles VIII, King of France, Michelangelo was seized with panic and fled to Venice (1494).

These superstitious terrors, irrational and uncontrollable, which reappeared more than once in Michelangelo's life do not prove anything in favour of his Savonarolaism. It might be supposed on the contrary that a true disciple of Savonarola would have remained beside his master rather than have abandoned him in the hour of danger. These panics which he could not control prove nothing but the unhealthy over-excitement of his nerves, which his reason fought against in vain all his life. It would be hard to find in his work at that period any appreciable effect of the ideas of Savonarola. The impassive Virgin with the robust child—the {10}bas-relief in bronze of the Casa Buonarroti—is far more a school piece by a pupil of Donatello than a religious work. What we know of the little wooden crucifix, carved in 1494 for the prior of the Convent of S. Spirito, shows us the artist without mysticism and with a passion for the observation of nature, who was eagerly studying anatomy from corpses until their putrefaction made him ill and forced him to stop. At Bologna, where he lived in 1449 after his flight from Florence, and where he heard of the results of Savonarola's preachings—the expulsion of the Medici, the death of Pico della Mirandola and of Poliziano and the scattering of the little circle of Florentine poets and philosophers—he spent his time in reading Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante to his protector, the noble Gianfrancesco Aldovrandi, and when he worked at the Arca (tabernacle) of S. Domenico it was to carve that athletic angel, superb and expressionless, which contrasts so strikingly with the pious figure of Niccolo dell'Arca to which it is the pendant. He was evidently much more occupied in studying and assimilating the imposing manner of Jacopo della Quercia, his indolent and heavy but powerful Siennese precursor, than in meditating on the prophecies of Savonarola.

He returned to Florence in 1495, and arrived in the midst of the struggle of the two parties, the "Arrabtiati"{11} and the "Piagnoni," at the very height of the carnival. He was consulted about the construction of the hall of the Grand Council in the Palace of the Signory. The Virgin of Manchester which suggests the school of Ghirlandajo may be attributed to this period, and also the Entombment of the National Gallery, which with all its sad grandeur is proud and cold.

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{12} 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{13} and a Christian as always, but his proud Christianity was not that