This page has been validated.
INTRODUCTION
15
repaired it by returning to the besieged city, where he did his duty until the end of the siege. But when Florence was taken, and proscription reigned, how weak and trembling he was! He even went so far as to pay court to Valori, the proscriber, who had just put his friend, the noble Battista della Palla, to death. Alas! He even went so far as disowning his friends the banished Florentines.[1]
He was frightened and mortally ashamed of his fear. He despised himself to such an extent that he fell ill. He wished to die, and it was believed that he was going to do so.[2]
But he could not die. A desperate force daily sprang up within him and kept him alive in order that he might
- ↑ “… Up to the present I have abstained from speaking or having intercourse with the banished. I shall take still greater care in the future … I speak to nobody. Above all, I do not speak with Florentines. If I am saluted in the street I cannot do anything else, however, than reply in a friendly manner. But I pass on. If I knew who the banished Florentines were I should respond in no manner whatsoever …” (Letter from Rome, in 1548, to his nephew Leonardo, who had informed him that he was accused in Florence of having relations with the banished, against whom Cosmo II. had just issued a very severe edict.)He went much further than this. He disavowed the hospitality which, as a sick man, he had received at the Strozzi’s:“As to the reproach which they make against me, namely, that during my illness I was received and nursed at the house of the Strozzi, I consider that I was not under their roof, but in the room of Luigi del Riccio, who was much attached to me.” (Luigi del Riccio was in the service of the Strozzi.) There was so little doubt that Michael Angelo had been the guest, not of Riccio, but of the Strozzi that he himself, two years before, had sent “The Two Slaves” (now in the Louvre) to Roberto Strozzi, in order to thank him for his hospitality.
- ↑ In 1531, after the taking of Florence, his submission to Clement VII. and his advances towards Valori.
