ectly," says Donato Giannotti, who
placed him as arbiter in his dialogues on Dante in 1545.[53]

Michelangelo dedicated to Dante one of his most beautiful sonnets in
which he envied his exile and his glory:

Fuss'io pur lui! c'a tal fortuna nato,
Per l'aspro esilio suo con la virtute
Dare' del mundo il piu felice stato.[54]

He knew equally well all the other classics of Italian lyric poetry,
Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia and Petrarch. His style is wrought from
theirs, but his thought is entirely his own.

"You speak words only, but he speaks in deeds," wrote Francesco Berni to
the poets of his time.

Tacete umquanco pallide viole
Et liquidi cristalli et fere snelli:
Et dice cose, e voi dite parole.[55]

It is true that this was not achieved without a great obscurity of
thought, remarked even by his contemporaries and which to us often makes
their reading very difficult.

"He writes what Phoebus, Euterpe and the divine fury dictate to him, and
afterward he hardly understands what he has written," says Lodovico
Martelli.[56]

The sonnet form cramped him, and characteristically he loved that form
because of its difficulty. He always delighted in doing violence to his
genius and in making himself suffer. His poetry has often been compared
to his sculpture. We can almost see him, as in Mariette's account,[57]
making the chips of marble fly under his chisel or tearing from the
block of his thought the idea that is haunting him, leaving it scarcely
freed from the matrix. Frey, in his admirable edition, which is the only
exact one of the "Rime" of Michelangelo, reveals the heroic fury with
which he composed. He strikes only the main chord on his instrument,
nothing more--no development, no variations. His dominant emotion once
expressed, there is nothing more to say, the idea is exhausted. Most of
his poems have remained in the condition of blocked-out torsos.

The most beautiful of these verses were written under the inspiration
of Vittoria Colonna and the religious ideas which she revived in him.
Separated from each other, they exchanged sonnets; she sent him forty
from Viterbo[58] and he answered her in verse.[59]

In 1544 Vittoria returned to Rome to live in the cloister of S. Anna and
remained there until her death on February 25, 1547. Her death
prostrated Michelangelo. "He remained for a long time stupefied and out
of his senses," says Condivi. But the faith which she had given back to