Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/30

 214 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS of essential service to him on that occasion. In the following year, 1516, he re« turned with Francis I. to France, and was attached to the French court as princi- pal painter. It appears, however, that during his residence in France he did not paint a single picture. His health had begun to decline from the time he left Italy ; and feeling his end approach, he prepared himself for it by religious med- itation, by acts of charity, and by a most conscientious distribution by will of all his worldly possessions to his relatives and friends. At length, after protracted suffering, this great and most extraordinary man died at Cloux, near Amboise, May 2, 1 519, being then in his sixty-seventh year. It is to be regretted that we cannot wholly credit the beautiful story of his dying in the arms of Francis I., who, as it is said, had come to visit him on his death-bed. It would indeed have been, as Fuseli expressed it, "an honor to the king, by which destiny would have atoned to that monarch for his future disaster at Pavia." MICHAEL ANGELO By Anna Jameson (1474-1564) w r E have spoken of Leonardo da Vinci. Michael Angelo, the other great luminary of art, was twenty-two years younger, but the more severe and reflective cast of his mind rendered their difference of age far less in effect than in reality. It is usual to compare Michael Angelo with Raphael, but he is more aptly compared with Leonardo da Vinci. All the great artists of that time, even Raphael himself, were influenced more or less by these, two extraordi- nary men, but they exercised no influence on each other. They started from opposite points ; they pur- sued throughout their whole existence, and in all they planned and achieved, a course as different as their re- spective characters. Michael Angelo Buonarroti was born at Setigna- no, near Florence, in the year 1474. He was descended from a family once no- ble — even among the noblest of the feudal lords of Northern Italy — the Counts of Canossa ; but that branch of it represented by his father, Luigi Leonardo Buonarroti Simoni, had for some generations become poorer and poorer, until the last descendant was thankful to accept an office in the law, and had been nominated magistrate or mayor (Podesta) of Chiusi. In this situation he had limited his ambition to the prospect of seeing his eldest son a notary or advocate