Page:The Life of Michael Angelo.djvu/220

152 these household quarrels. "Oh, that she had never been here!" he wrote in 1560, after dismissing a servant named Girolama.

His room was as dark as a tomb, "spiders created there a thousand pieces of work and unwound their little distaffs." Halfway up the staircase he had painted a figure of Death, bearing a coffin on his shoulders.

He lived like a poor man, ate hardly anything, and, "being unable to sleep, used to get up at night to work with his chisel. He had made a helmet of paper, and kept a lighted candle above the middle of his head, which lighted the work without embarassing his hands."