upright position, so that it could swing freely without striking the ground—advanced. It took four days to move it from the Duomo to the Old Palace. On the 18th, at noon, it reached its destination. They continued to keep a guard around it at night, but, one evening, in spite of all precautions, it was stoned.[1]
Such was that Florentine people who are sometimes held up to us as a model.[2]
In 1504 the Seigniory of Florence pitted Michael Angelo against Leonardo da Vinci.
The two men were not fond of each other. Their common solitude ought to have brought them together. But if they felt that they were far removed from the rest of men, they were still more distant the one from the other. The more isolated of the two was Leonardo. He was fifty-two years of age—twenty years Michael Angelo's senior. Since the age of thirty he had been absent from Florence, the bitterness of whose passions was intolerable to his somewhat timid and delicate nature, to his serene and sceptical intellect, open to everything and understanding everything. This great dilettante, this man absolutely free and absolutely alone, was so detached from native country, religion and the entire world that he was only at his ease when with tyrants, who, like himself, were free minded. Forced to leave Milan in 1499, owing to the fall of his protector, Lodovico il Moro,
- ↑ Contemporary narrative and Pietro di Maico Parcnti's "Florentine Stories."
- ↑ Let me add that the chaste nudity of the "David" shocked the Florentines. Aretino, reproaching Michael Angelo with the indecency of his "Last Judgment," wrote to him in 1515: "Imitate the modesty of the Florentines, who hide under leaves of gold the shameful parts of their beautiful Colossus."
