t is placed. The Lord God in His goodness long preserve him to us, for
without doubt the same day will end his life and his labours, as is
written of Socrates. His active and vigorous old age gives me firm hope
that he has many years to live, as also the long life of his father, who
lived to ninety-two years without knowing what it was to have a fever, and
then dying more for lack of resolution than for any illness; so that when
he was dead, as Michael Angelo relates, his face retained the same colour
that he had when living, appearing rather asleep than dead.

LVI. From a child Michael Angelo was a hard worker, and to the gifts of
nature added study, not using the labours and industry of others, but,
desiring to learn from nature herself, he set her up before him as the
true example. There is no animal whose anatomy he did not desire to study,
much more than that of man; so that those who have spent all their lives
in that science, and who make a profession of it, hardly know so much of
it as he. I speak of such knowledge as is necessary to the arts of
painting and sculpture, not of other minutiae that anatomists observe. And
thus it is that his figures show so much art and learning, so that they
are inimitable by any painter whatever. I have always been of this
opinion, that the forces and efforts of nature have a prescribed end,
fixed and ordained by God, which it is impossible for ordinary powers to
pass; and this is so not only in painting and sculpture, but universally
in all arts and sciences; and that she gives power to one person that he
may be a rule and example in a particular art, giving him the first place;
so that afterwards, if any one desires to bring forth a great work in that
art, worthy to be read or seen, he must work in the same way as the first
great example, or, at least, similarly, and go by his road; for if he does
not his work will be much inferior, the worse the more he diverges from
the direct path. After Plato and Aristotle, how many philosophers have we
seen who, not following them, have been worth anything? How many orators
after Demosthenes and Cicero? How many mathematicians after Euclid and
Archimedes? How many doctors after Hypocrates and Galen? Or poets after
Homer and Virgil? And if there has been any one who has been able by his
own abilities to arrive at the first place in any one of these sciences
and finds it already occupied, he either acknowledges the first one to
have arrived at