Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/46

56 houses have in the mean time passed out of the hands of the former great possessor's family, and nothing speaks of them excepting the inscription outside. The house of Michael Angelo Buonarotti, has alone remained as it was in the time of the great artist, furnished and decorated by himself. It belongs at the present time to one of his descendants, a Buonarotti, now Minister of Finance in Tuscany. The house is shown to strangers twice in the week, and I too, went accordingly to see it. The exterior of the house is not remarkable; it is now so closely built round by other houses, that the rooms are in consequence darkened. These rooms are full of the great artist's life, and altogether too much of his deification. His pupils have represented scenes from his life in a number of pictures. The rooms, which are many, though small, contain numerous pieces of sculpture, and sketches from the hand of the great master, and many precious pieces of furniture and other things; the smallest space is every where made use of, and decorated with a kind of artistic coquetry. In the chapel is a small figure of Christ, in bronze—by Benvenuto Celini, as it is said; and in the innermost, small room, a portrait of Michael Angelo, painted by himself, and a bust from the mask taken immediately after his death. These present a face devoid of beauty and even of nobility; the nose is flat and broad, but in the expression of the countenance, and the compressed lips, you can see “those thousand devils,” which the Swedish sculptor Sergei, required as a proof of true genius. Michael Angelo was of a militant nature in his art; and his character and temper were not without the rough,