Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/393

1564] boy had made in imitation of a print by Schöngauer, of St. Anthony surrounded by beasts and fishes, carefully copied from those which he saw in the market. The painter, seeing the boy's evident talent for drawing, offered to take him into his shop, and on the 1st of April, 1488, Michelangelo was apprenticed to Ghirlandajo for a period of three years. His powers of draughtmanship were the surprise and envy of his comrades, and one day when he made a sketch of his master and his assistants at work on the scaffolding in the choir of Santa Maria Novella, Ghirlandajo exclaimed—"The boy knows more than I do!" Even then his irritable temper and sharp speeches often excited the wrath of his companions, and one day when the young artists were copying Masaccio's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, Piero Torrigiano struck him a blow on the nose, and, as he told Cellini, left a mark which the great master carried with him to the grave. But Michelangelo did not remain long in Ghirlandajo's shop. In 1489, when he and Granacci were drawing antiques in the Medici gardens, Lorenzo saw the boy copying a marble Faun, and was so much struck at the skill with which he knocked a tooth out of the upper jaw of the head, to make it appear older, that he took him into his own household. For the next two years Michelangelo lived in the palace of Via Larga, dining at the same table as the Magnifico's children, and treated as one of the family. There he met the best painters and foremost scholars of the day, and saw the finest art of past and present times—the paintings of Pollaiuolo and Botticelli, and the gems and intaglios of Lorenzo's collec-