er than have abandoned him in the hour of danger. These panics which
he could not control prove nothing but the unhealthy over-excitement of
his nerves, which his reason fought against in vain all his life. It
would be hard to find in his work at that period any appreciable effect
of the ideas of Savonarola. The impassive Virgin with the robust
child--the bas-relief in bronze of the Casa Buonarroti--is far more a
school piece by a pupil of Donatello than a religious work. What we know
of the little wooden crucifix, carved in 1494 for the prior of the
Convent of S. Spirito, shows us the artist without mysticism and with a
passion for the observation of nature, who was eagerly studying anatomy
from corpses until their putrefaction made him ill and forced him to
stop. At Bologna, where he lived in 1449 after his flight from Florence,
and where he heard of the results of Savonarola's preachings--the
expulsion of the Medici, the death of Pico della Mirandola and of
Poliziano and the scattering of the little circle of Florentine poets
and philosophers--he spent his time in reading Petrarch, Boccaccio and
Dante to his protector, the noble Gianfrancesco Aldovrandi, and when he
worked at the Arca (tabernacle) of S. Domenico it was to carve that
athletic angel, superb and expressionless, which contrasts so strikingly
with the pious figure of Niccolo dell'Arca to which it is the pendant.
He was evidently much more occupied in studying and assimilating the
imposing manner of Jacopo della Quercia, his indolent and heavy but
powerful Siennese precursor, than in meditating on the prophecies of
Savonarola.

He returned to Florence in 1495, and arrived in the midst of the
struggle of the two parties, the "Arrabtiati" and the "Piagnoni," at
the very height of the carnival. He was consulted about the construction
of the hall of the Grand Council in the Palace of the Signory. The
Virgin of Manchester which suggests the school of Ghirlandajo may be
attributed to this period, and also the Entombment of the National
Gallery, which with all its sad grandeur is proud and cold.

Michelangelo left Florence in June, 1496. He went to Rome and in that
town so full of classic memories he absorbed himself in classic works.
It is fair to say that he was never so pagan as from 1492 to 1497, the
years during which the tragedy of Savonarola was enacted. This is the
period of the colossal Hercules[8] in marble (1492), of the famous
sleeping Cupid, wrought