Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 5.djvu/248

236 the High Altar,. This he did to please the Prior, who had given him a room wherein he dissected many dead bodies, and, zealously studying anatomy, began to give evidence of that perfection to which he afterwards brought his design. Some weeks before the Medici were driven from Plorence, Michelagnolo had gone to Bologna, and thence to Venice, having remarked the insolence and bad government of Piero, and fearing that some evil would happen to himself, as a servant of the Medici: but finding no means of existence in Venice, he returned to Bologna, where he had the misfortune to neglect the countersign, which it was needful to take at the gate, if one desired to go out again; Messer Giovanni Bentivogli having then commanded that all strangers, who had not this protection, should be fined fifty Bolognese lira. This fine Michelagnolo had no means of paying, but he having, by chance, been seen by Messer Giovan Prancesco Aldovrandi, one of the sixteen members of the government, the latter, making him tell his story, delivered him from that peril, and kept him in his own house for more than a year. One day, Aldovrandi took him to see the Tomb of San Domenico, which is said to have been executed by the old sculptors, Giovanni Pisano and Maestro Niccolò delF Area: here, as it was found that two figures, of a braccio high, a San Petronio, and an Angel holding a candlestick namely, were wanting, Aldovrandi asked Michelagnolo if he had courage to undertake them, when he replied that he had; and having selected a piece of marble, he completed them in such sort that they are the best figures of the work, and he received thirty ducats for the two. He remained, as we have said, a year with Aldovrandi, and to have obliged him would have remained longer, the latter being pleased with his ability in design, and also with his Tuscan pronunciation in reading, listening with pleasure while Michelagnolo read the works of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and other Tuscan authors. But our artist, knowing that he was losing time at