Italy was one of the great movements in the
series of human development. It peculiarly characterized the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. It was an age of artistic wonders, of great
creations.

Italy, especially, was glorious when Michael Angelo was born, 1474; when
the rest of Europe was comparatively rude, and when no great works in
art, in poetry, in history, or philosophy had yet appeared. He was
descended from an illustrious family, and was destined to one of the
learned professions; but he could not give up his mind to anything but
drawing,--as annoying to his father as Galileo's experiments were to his
parent; as unmeaning to him as Gibbon's History was to George
III.,--"Scribble, scribble, scribble; Mr. Gibbon, I perceive, sir, you
are always a-scribbling." No perception of a new power, no sympathy with
the abandonment to a specialty not indorsed by fashions and traditions,
but without which abandonment genius cannot easily be developed. At last
the father yielded, and the son was apprenticed to a painter,--a
degradation in the eyes of Mediaeval aristocracy.

The celebrated Lorenzo de' Medici was then in the height of power and
fame in Florence, adored by Roscoe as the patron of artists and poets,
although he subverted the liberties of his country. This over-lauded
prince, heir of the fortunes of a great family of merchants, wishing to
establish a school for sculpture, filled a garden with statues, and
freely admitted to it young scholars in art. Michael Angelo was one of
the most frequent and enthusiastic visitors to this garden, where in due
time he attracted the attention of the magnificent Lord of Florence by a
head chiselled so remarkably that he became an inmate of the palace, sat
at the table of Lorenzo, and at last was regularly adopted as one of the
Prince's family, with every facility for prosecuting his studies. Before
he was eighteen the youth had sculptured the battle of Hercules with the
Centaurs, which he would never part with, and which still remains in his
family; so well done that he himself, at the age of eighty, regretted
that he had not given up his whole life to sculpture.

It was then as a sculptor that Michael Angelo first appears to the
historical student,--about the year 1492, when Columbus was crossing the
great unknown ocean to realize his belief in a western passage to India.
Thus commercial enterprise began with the revival of art, and was
destined never to be separated in its a