Though Michelangelo’s earliest studies were directed towards painting, he was by nature and predilection much more inclined to sculpture. In that art he presently received encouragement and training under the eye of an illustrious patron, Lorenzo dei Medici. On the recommendation, it is said, of Ghirlandaio, he was transferred, before the term of his apprenticeship as a painter had expired, to the school of sculpture established by Lorenzo in the Medici gardens. Here he could learn to match himself against his great predecessor, Donatello, one of whose pupils was the director of the school, and to compare the works of that master and his Tuscan contemporaries with the antiques collected for the instruction of the scholars. Here, too, he could listen to discourses on Platonism, and steep himself in the doctrines of an enthusiastic philosophy which sought to reconcile with Christian faith the lore and the doctrines of the Academy. Michelangelo remained a Christian Platonist to the end of his days; he was also from his youth up a devoted student of Dante. His powers of mind and hand soon attracted attention, and secured him the regard and favour of his patrons in spite of his rugged, unsociable exterior, and of a temper which at best was but a half-smothered volcano.

Michelangelo had been attached to the school and household of the Medici for barely three years when, in 1492, his great patron Lorenzo died. Lorenzo’s son Piero dei Medici inherited the position, but not the qualities, of his father; Florence soon chafed under his authority; and towards the autumn of 1494 it became apparent that disaster was impending over him and his adherents. Michelangelo was constitutionally subject to dark and sudden presentiments: one such seized him now, and, without awaiting the popular outbreak which soon followed, he took horse with two companions and fled to Bologna. There, being now in his twentieth year, he was received with kindness by a member of the Aldovrandi family, and on his commission executed two figures of saints, and one of an angel, for the shrine of St Dominic in the church of St Petronius. After about a year, work at Bologna failing, and his name having been included in his absence on the list of artists appointed to provide a new hall of assembly for the Great Council of Florence, Michelangelo returned home. The strange theocracy established by Savonarola was now in force, and the whole character of civic life at Florence was for the time being changed. But Michelangelo was not left without employment. He found a friend in another Lorenzo, the son of Pierfrancesco dei Medici, for whom he at this time executed a statue of the boy St John. Having also carved a recumbent Cupid in imitation of the antique, it was suggested to him by the same patron that it should be so tinted and treated as to look like a real antique, and sold accordingly. Without increasing the price he put upon the work, Michelangelo for amusement lent himself to the counterfeit, and the piece was then actually sold for a large sum to a Roman collector, the cardinal San Giorgio, as a genuine work of antiquity,—the dealer appropriating the profits. When presently the cardinal discovered the fraud, he caused the dealer to refund; but as to Michelangelo himself, it was represented to the young sculptor that if he went to Rome, the amateur who had just involuntarily paid so high a tribute to his skill would certainly befriend him. He set forth accordingly, and arrived at Rome for the first time at the end of June 1496. Such hopes as he may have entertained of countenance from the cardinal San Giorgio were quickly dispelled. Neither did the banished Piero dei Medici, who also was now living at Rome, do anything to help him. On the other hand Michelangelo won the favour of a Roman nobleman, Jacopo Galli, and through him of the French cardinal Jean de Villiers de la Grolaie, abbot of St Denis. From the former he received a commission for a Cupid and a Bacchus, from the latter for a Pietà, or Mary lamenting over the body of Christ,—works of which probably all three, the last two certainly, are preserved.

Michelangelo’s stay in Rome at this time lasted five years, from the summer of 1496 till that of 1501. The interval had been one of extreme political distraction at Florence. The excitement of the French invasion, the mystic and ascetic regimen of Savonarola, the reaction which led to his overthrow’, and finally the external wars and internal dissidences which preceded a new^ettlement, had all created an atmosphere most unfavourable to art Nevertheless Ludovico Buonarroti, who in the troubles of 1494 had lost a small permanent appointment he held in the customs, and had come to regard his son Michelangelo as the mainstay of his house, had been repeatedly urging him to come home.

A spirit of family duty and family pride was the ruling principle in all Michelangelo’s conduct. During the best years of his life he submitted himself sternly and without a murmur to pinching hardship and almost superhuman labour for the sake of his father and brothers, who were ever selfishly ready to be fed and helped by him. Having now, after an illness, come home in 1501, Michelangelo received the request from the cardinal Francesco Piccolomini to adorn with a number of sculptured figures a shrine already begun in the cathedral of Siena in honour of the most distinguished member of his house, Pope Pius II. Four only of these figures were ever executed, and those not apparently, or only in small part, by the master’s hand. A work of greater interest in Florence itself had diverted him from his engagement to his Sienese patron. This was the execution of the famous colossal statue of David, popularly known as the Giant. It was carved out of a huge block of marble on which another sculptor, Agostino d’Antonio, had begun unsuccessfully to work forty years before, and which had been lying idle ever since. Michelangelo had here a difficult problem before him. Without much regard to tradition or the historical character of his hero, he carved out of the vast but cramped mass of material a youthful, frowning colossus, which amazed every beholder by its freedom and science of execution, and its victorious energy of expression. All the best artists of Florence were called in council to determine on what site it should be set up, and after much debate the terrace of the Palace of the Signory was chosen, in preference to the neighbouring Loggia dei Lanzi. Here accordingly the colossal David of Michelangelo took, in the month of May 1504, the place which it continued to hold ever afterwards, until ten years ago, in 1873, it was removed for the sake of protection to a hall in the Academy of Fine Arts. Other works of sculpture by the same indomitable hand also belong to this period: among these another David, in bronze, and on a smaller scale; a great rough-hewn St Matthew begun but never completed for the cathedral of Florence; a Μ adonna and Child executed on the commission of a merchant of Bruges; and two unfinished bas-reliefs of the same subject.

Neither was Michelangelo idle at the same time as a painter. Leaving -disputed works for the moment out of sight, he in these days at any rate painted for his and Raphael’s common patron, Angelo Doni, the Holy Family now in the Uffizi at Florence. And in the autumn of 1504, the year of the completion of the David, he received from the Florentine state a commission for a work of monumental painting on an heroic scale. Leonardo da Vinci had been for some months engaged on his great cartoon of the Battle of Anghiari, to be painted on the wall of the great hall of the municipal council. The gonfaloniere Soderini now procured for Michelangelo the commission to design a companion work. Michelangelo chose an incident of the Pisan war, when the Florentine soldiery had been surprised by the enemy in the act of bathing: he dashed at the task with his accustomed fiery energy, and had carried a great part of the cartoon to completion when, in the early spring of 1505, he broke off the work in order to obey a call to Rome which reached him from Pope Julius II. His unfinished cartoon showed how greatly Michelangelo had profited by the example of his elder rival, Leonardo, little as, personally, he yielded to his charm or could bring himself to respond to his courtesy. The work of Michelangelo’s youth is for the most part comparatively tranquil in character. His early sculpture, showing a degree of science and perfection unequalled since the antique, has also something of the antique serenity. It bears strongly the stamp of intellectual research, but not by any means that of storm or strain. In the cartoon of the Bathers, he on the other hand appropriated and carried further the mastery, which Leonardo had first asserted, over every variety of violent action and every extreme of energetic movement. In it the qualities afterwards proverbially associated with Michelangelo—his furia, his terribilità, the tempest and hurricane of the spirit which accompanied his unequalled technical mastery and knowledge—first found expression.

With Michelangelo’s departure to Rome early in 1505 the first part of his artistic career may be said to end. It will be convenient here to recapitulate its principal results in sculpture and painting, both those preserved, and those recorded but lost.

Sculpture. —Florence, 1489-94. Head of a Faun, National Museum, Florence (?). Condivi describes Michelangelo’s first essay in sculpture as a head of an aged faun with a front tooth knocked out, this latter point having been an afterthought suggested by Lorenzo dei Medici. The head is commonly identified with one in the National Museum at Florence, which, however, bears no marks of Michelangelo’s style, and is in all probability spurious. Madonna Seated on a Step, Casa Buonarroti, Florence. This bas-relief is a genuine example of Michelangelo’s early work in the Medicean school under Bertoldo. It is executed in low relief in imitation of the technical style of Donatello; but the attitudes and characters of the figures, and the long-drawn, somewhat tormented folds of drapery, recall rather the manner of Jacopo della Quercia. Centauromachia, Casa Buonarroti. A fine and unquestionably genuine work in full relief, of probably somewhat later date than the last-mentioned; Michelangelo has followed the antique in his conception and treatment of the nude, but not at all in the arrangement of the subject, which occurs frequently in works of ancient art.

Bologna, 1494-95. Kneeling Angel, supporting the shrine of St Dominic. This is the figure, with crisp hair, short resolute features, and drapery clinging to show the limbs, on the righthand side of the spectator as he fronts the altar. The prettier and more engaging figure at the opposite end was long taken to be Michelangelo’s work, but is really that of Niecolo dell’ Area. Michelangelo also finished the figure of St Petronius on the cornice of the same altar, begun by the same Niccolo, and executed one of St Proculus which has perished.

Florence, 1495-96. St John in the Wilderness, Berlin Museum. During the year between Michelangelo’s return from Bologna and his first departure to Rome he executed, as has been narrated above, a statue of S. Giovannino for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco dei Medici. This had for centuries been supposed lost, when in 1874 it was declared to have been found in the possession of Count Gualandi-Rossalmini at Pisa. Vehement and prolonged discussions arose as to the authenticity of the work, and at last it was bought for the Berlin Museum, where its genuineness is with apparently good reason maintained. The stripling saint stands naked but for a skin about his loins, holding a honeycomb in his left hand and lifting to his mouth a goat’s horn full of honey with his right. Restoration of an antique group of Bacchus and Ampelus, Uffizi Gallery, Florence. This interesting restoration of an antique torso, by the addition of a head, the lower part of the legs, and the accessory figure of an attendant genius, a plinth, and mask, is not one of the works traditionally ascribed to Michelangelo; but has lately, and as it seems rightly, been claimed for him on internal evidence. Recumbent Cupid, bought by the cardinal San Giorgio as an antique. This work, which played an important part in Michelangelo’s history, is unfortunately lost.

Rome, 1495-1501. Kneeling Cupid, South Kensington Museum, London. This beautiful statue of an athletic youth kneeling on the right knee, looking over his right shoulder, with the right hand lowered and the left raised, and having a quiver on the ground beside him, is acknowledged on internal grounds as an early work of Michelangelo. There is some ambiguity about the character and action of the personage; but the work is usually identified with the Cupid which Michelangelo is recorded to have executed at this time for Jacopo Galli. Bacchus and Young Faun, National Museum, Florence. This is unquestionably the “Bacchus” commissioned by the same patron. The finely-framed but soft-limbed youthful god, his weight supported somewhat staggeringly on the left leg, holds up a wine cup in his right hand, and with his loosely-hanging left hand holds a cluster of grapes, at which a child-faun standing a little behind him grasps ami nibbles. The surface highly finished and polished, as in the Berlin St John. Virgin Lamenting the Dead Christ, St Peter’s, Rome. This group, executed for the French abbot of St Denis, is the finest of all Michelangelo’s early sculptures, and one of the finest of his life. It still recalls the ideals of some of the earlier Tuscan masters, especially Jacopo da Quercia; but the execution is of a mastery and nobility unprecedented in Italian art. The Virgin, in drapery of magnificent design, with her left knee somewhat raised and her right hand slightly extended, sits holding on her lap the dead Christ,—a figure of splendid frame and modelling as well as of admirable pathos and dignity in expression.

Florence, 1501-6. Four Sainis decorating the Shrine of Pius II., in the cathedral of Siena. These figures represent the only part which Michelangelo ever completed of his contract with the cardinal Piccolomini and his heirs. They are evidently carried out by the hand of pupils only. Virgin and Child, Liebfrauenkirche, Bruges. This pleasing group has been since the days of Albert Diirer attributed to Michelangelo, and bears the manifest stamp of his design, though its execution may be partly by inferior hands. It is placed close to the tombstone of a member of the Moscheroni (or Moskeron) family. We know that Michelangelo executed at this time, for one of this very family, a work which the ancient biographers describe as having been in bronze,—a medallion in that metal, says explicitly Vasari; but it is probably really the marble group in question. Virgin and Child, Royal Academy, London. This beautiful unfinished circular relief is identified with one recorded to have been executed by the master for Taddeo Gaddi. Virgin and Child, National Museum, Florence,—a similar relief, also unfinished, originally ordered by Bartolommeo Pitti. Youthful David, Academy of Arts, Florence. Of this colossal work, which in spite of its scale and subject has still, in grace of pose and style, a considerable artistic affinity with the earlier Bacchus and St John, enough has been said. Figure of David, a small statue in bronze. Several extant works have been pointed out as probably identical with this lost statue; but the claims of none have been generally acknowledged.

Painting.— Holy Family, Uffizi, Florence. This circular picture, painted for Angelo Doni, and mentioned by the earliest biographers, is the only perfectly well-attested panel-painting of Michelangelo which exists. His love of restless and somewhat strained actions is illustrated by the action of the Madonna, who kneels on the ground holding up the child on her right shoulder; his love of the nude by the introduction (wherein he follows Luca Signorelli) of some otherwise purposeless undraped figures in the background. Virgin and Child with Four Angels, National Gallery, London. This unfinished painting, marked by great grace as well as severity of feeling and design, was formerly attributed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, but is now commonly held to be the earliest extant picture by Michelangelo. Of his manner, especially in the design and treatment of the drapery, it bears evident marks; but the execution seems like that of some weaker pupil or companion, perhaps Ridolfo Ghirlandaio or Granacci. Entombment of Christ, National Gallery, London. This picture, also unfinished, has in like manner been much contested. Its composition is unfortunate; weaker hands have disfigured some portions of the work; but the extraordinary excellence of other portions, and the grandeur of some of the actions, render it probable that the work is one begun and afterwards abandoned by Michelangelo himself. Cartoon of the Battle of Anghiari. Of this famous lost work (begun, though apparently not completed, in the period now engaging us) the only authentic record is contained in two early engravings, one by Marcantonio and the other by Agostino Veneziano. An elaborate drawing of many figures at Hoikham Hall, well known and often engraved, seems to be a later cento destitute of real authority.

Michelangelo had not been long in Rome before Pope Julius devised fit employment for him. That capacious and headstrong spirit, on fire with great enterprises, had conceived the idea of a sepulchral monument to commemorate his glory when he should be dead, and to be executed according to his own plans while he was still living. He entrusted this congenial task to Michelangelo. The design being approved, the artist spent the winter of 1505-6 at the quarries of Carrara, superintending the excavation and shipment of the necessary marbles. In the spring he returned to Rome, and when the marbles arrived fell to with all his energy at the preparations for the work. For a while the pope followed their progress eagerly, and was all kindness to the young sculptor. But presently his disposition changed. In Michelangelo’s absence an artist who was no friend of his, Bramante of Urbino, had been selected by Julius to carry out a new architectural scheme, commensurate with the usual vastness of his conceptions, namely the rebuilding of St Peter’s church. To the influence and the malice of Bramante Michelangelo attributed the unwelcome invitation he now received to interrupt the great work of sculpture which he had just begun, in order to decorate the Sixtine chapel with frescos. Soon, however, schemes of war and conquest interposed to divert the thoughts of Julius, not from the progress of his own monument merely, but from artistic enterprises altogether. One day Michelangelo heard him say at table to his jeweller that he meant to spend no more money on pebbles...