is highly valued, and the rather as there is no other bassorilievo by his hand.
But to return to the garden of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Of this place, adorned with valuable antiques and excellent pictures, collected there for study and pleasure, Michelagnolo had the keys, and proved himself more careful as well as more prompt in all his actions than any of the other young men who frequented the place, giving proof of boldness and animation in all that he did. He laboured at the pictures of Massaccio in the Carmine also for many months, copying them with so much judgment that the artists were amazed thereat; but envy now increased with his fame; respecting this we find it related that Torrigiano, having formed an intimacy with Michelagnolo, and becoming envious of his distinction in art, one day, when jeering our artist, struck him so violent a blow in the face that his nose was broken and crushed in a manner from which it could never be recovered, so that he was marked for life; whereupon Torrigiano was banished Plorence as we have before related.
On the death of Lorenzo, Michelagnolo returned to his father’s house in great sorrow for his loss; here he bought a large piece of marble from which he made a Hercules, four braccia high, which was much admired, and after having remained for some years in the Strozzi Palace, was sent to France, in the year of the siege, by Giovan Battista della Palla. It is said that Piero de’ Medici, the heir of Lorenzo, who had been long intimate with Michelagnolo, often sent for him when about to purchase cameos or other antiques; and that, one winter, when much snow fell in Florence, he caused Michelagnolo to make in his court a Statue of Snow, which was exceedingly beautiful.[1] His father, seeing him thus honoured for his abilities, and beginning to perceive that he was esteemed by the great, now began to clothe him in a more stately manner than he had before done.
For the Church of Santa Spirito, in Florence, Michelagnolo made a Crucifix in wood, which is placed over the lunette of
- ↑ Condivi adds that Piero kept him in the Casa Medici, as his father had done, but whereas Lorenzo had given him such men as Politian for his associates, Piero coupled his name with that of a Spanish lacquey, boasting of these two as his most useful domestics. “The calling him to make a statue of snow,” remarks Bottari, “was a childish and unworthy action.”
