weeping and shouting like demented beings. The wealthiest citizens—the Ruccellais, the Salviatis, the Albizzis, and the Strozzis—demanded to enter into Orders. Learned men and philosophers, including Pic de la Mirandole and Politiano, themselves abdicated.[1] Michael Angelo's elder brother Leonardo became a Dominican.[2]
Michael Angelo did not escape this contagious terror. When he whom the prophet had announced approached—the new Cyrus, the sword of God, the little deformed monster, Charles VIII., King of France—he was panic-stricken. A dream threw his mind off its balance.
One of his friends, Cardiere, a poet and musician, saw, one night; the shade of Lorenzo de' Medici,[3] with his half-naked body wrapped in a black tattered robe. The dead man commanded him to tell his son Piero that shortly he would be driven from his house never again to return. Michael Angelo, to whom Cardiere confided the story of his vision, exhorted him to relate everything to the prince; but the poet, who was frightened of Piero,
- ↑ They died shortly afterwards, in 1494. Politiano requested to be buried as a Dominican at the Church of St. Mark—Savonarola's church. When about to die Pic de la Mirandole put on the dress of a Dominican.
- ↑ In 1491.
- ↑ Lorenzo de' Medici had died on April 8, 1492, and was succeeded by his son, Piero. Michael Angelo then left the palace and returned to his father's, where he remained for some time without employment. Taking him into his service again, Piero charged him with the purchase of cameos and intaglios. His next piece of work was a colossal Hercules in marble, which, after being at the Strozzi Palace, was purchased in 1529 by Francis I. and placed at Fontainebleau, where, in the seventeenth century, it disappeared. The "Crucifix de Bois" of the Convent of San Spirito, in the making of which Michael Angelo studied anatomy on dead bodies to such an extent that he fell ill (1494), also belongs to this period.
