and the men who claimed the right to
succeed him. This agglomeration of sculpture recalls also that bitter
saying of Michelangelo shortly before his end that "art and death do not
go well together."

"L'arte e la morte non va bene insieme."

From 1564 to 1572 Vasari raised in Santa Croce, at the expense of
Lionardo Buonarroti, and with the collaboration of Borghini, Valerio
Cioli and Battista Lorenzi, the monument to Michelangelo. Thode has
proved that the so-called tomb of Michelangelo in the SS. Apostoli in
Rome has nothing whatever to do with him. It is really the monument of a
professor of medicine, Ferdinando Eustacio, and the false attribution
dates only from 1823.

CHAPTER VI

THE GENIUS OF MICHELANGELO AND HIS INFLUENCE ON ITALIAN ART

"I have no friend of any kind," said Michelangelo in 1509, "and I do not
want any."[127]

Forty years later, in 1548, Michelangelo wrote again, "I am always alone
and I speak to no one."[128]

"From his youth," says Condivi, "Michelangelo had consecrated himself
not only to sculpture and painting, but to all the other arts with such
devouring energy that he had to separate himself almost entirely from
the society of men. For that reason many people considered him proud,
and others eccentric or mad. In reality it was his love of work alone,
his labour without respite, which made him solitary, for he was so
filled by the joy and rapture which his work gave him that the society
of men did not offer him any pleasure, but rather bored him by
distracting him from his own thoughts. Like the great Scipio, he was
never less lonely than when he was alone."

That passionate solitude was the very soul of the genius and of the work
of Michelangelo. He lived shut up in himself without any real connection
with the art of his time. He despised Raphael because he said, "All his
talent came from study and not from nature."[129] He himself declared
that he derived all his inspiration from within, and if in his pride he
underestimated what he was always studying with feverish and persistent
ardour, yet it is true that he never sought in the study of the works of
others a means of changing or of renewing his own personality, but only
of still further emphasising it. In a way he sought from others not
examples or lessons, but reasons for being still more himself. It is
true that from the beginning to the end he fed on his own soul. Who
knows the man, knows his work.

The most striki