Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/397

1564] Although he was always liberal to others, Michelangelo's own habits were singularly frugal. "Ascanio," he often remarked to his friend and biographer Condivi, "rich as I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man." He dined off a crust of bread which he ate in the midst of his labours, and slept little, generally going to bed in his clothes and high boots, and often sharing his room, and even his bed, with his assistants. A poet and a dreamer by nature, he devoted his spare moments to the study of Dante and Petrarch's poetry and the composition of sonnets, and his love of solitude, and irritable and suspicious temper, made him shrink from the society of others. Unlike Raphael, he formed no school, and never confided the execution of his designs to assistants. But to the few scholars such as Vasari, Sebastian del Piombo or Daniele da Volterra, who attached themselves to his person, his kindness and generosity were unbounded, and both his letters and sonnets reveal the depth of love and tenderness in his heart.

On his return to Florence, Michelangelo received an important commission from the Board of Works of the Duomo, who charged him to make a colossal statue out of a block of marble which had been spoilt by an inferior sculptor some years before. From this mis-shapen block, Michelangelo now carved his giant David, and on the 25th of January, 1504, eighteen leading Florentine masters met to choose a site for the new colossus. Sandro Botticelli and Cosimo Rosselli recommended the Piazza of the Duomo, Leonardo and the architect San Gallo were strongly of opinion that the statue should be placed in the