Page:The Life of Michael Angelo.djvu/26

4 Michael Angelo belonged to that city and to those days, with all their prejudices, passions, and feverish life.

Certainly he was not tender towards his compatriots. With his broad-chested, open-air genius, he despised their narrow artistic outlook, their pretentious intellect, their dull realism, their sentimentalism, and their morbid subtlety. He handled them roughly; but he loved them nevertheless. As regards his native place, he did not possess Leonardo's smiling indifference. When far from Florence he was consumed with home-sickness. During his whole life he wore himself out in vain efforts to live there. He was in Florence in the tragic hour of war; and it was his desire "to return there at least when dead, since he had been unable to do so when alive."

Old Florentine that he was, he was filled with the pride of his blood and his race. He was prouder of his