the original of some old master. "His only object,"
adds Vasari, "was to keep the originals, by giving copies in exchange;
seeing that he admired them as specimens of art, and sought to surpass
them by his own handling; and in doing this he acquired great renown."
We may pause to doubt whether at the present time--in the case, for
instance, of Shelley letters or Rossetti drawings--clever forgeries
would be accepted as so virtuous and laudable. But it ought to be
remembered that a Florentine workshop at that period contained masses
of accumulated designs, all of which were more or less the common
property of the painting firm. No single specimen possessed a high
market value. It was, in fact, only when art began to expire in Italy,
when Vasari published his extensive necrology and formed his famous
collection of drawings, that property in a sketch became a topic for
moral casuistry.

Of Michelangelo's own work at this early period we possess probably
nothing except a rough scrawl on the plaster of a wall at Settignano.
Even this does not exist in its original state. The Satyr which is
still shown there may, according to Mr. Heath Wilson's suggestion, be
a _rifacimento_ from the master's hand at a subsequent period of his
career.

V

Condivi and Vasari differ considerably in their accounts of
Michelangelo's departure from Ghirlandajo's workshop. The former
writes as follows: "So then the boy, now drawing one thing and now
another, without fixed place or steady line of study, happened one day
to be taken by Granacci into the garden of the Medici at San Marco,
which garden the magnificent Lorenzo, father of Pope Leo, and a man of
the first intellectual distinction, had adorned with antique statues
and other reliques of plastic art. When Michelangelo saw these things
and felt their beauty, he no longer frequented Domenico's shop, nor
did he go elsewhere, but, judging the Medicean gardens to be the best
school, spent all his time and faculties in working there." Vasari
reports that it was Lorenzo's wish to raise the art of sculpture in
Florence to the same level as that of painting; and for this reason he
placed Bertoldo, a pupil and follower of Donatello, over his
collections, with a special commission to aid and instruct the young
men who used them. With the same intention of forming an academy or
school of art, Lorenzo went to Ghirlandajo, and begged him to select
from his pupils those whom he considered the most pr