Michael Angelo Buonarroti / With Translations Of The Life Of The Master By His Scholar, Ascanio Condivi, And Three Dialogues From The Portugese By Francisco d'Ollanda

Michael Angelo Buonarroti
By Charles Holroyd, Keeper of the National Gallery of British Art, with Translations of the Life of the Master by His Scholar, Ascanio Condivi, and Three Dialogues from the Portuguese by Francisco d'Ollanda

MICHAEL ANGELO
From an early proof of the engraving by GIULIO BONASONI (In the Print Room of the British Museum)
Of all the many lives of Michael Angelo that have been written, that by his friend and pupil, Ascanio Condivi, is the most valuable. For not only is it a contemporary record, like the lives inserted by Giorgio Vasari in the two editions of his famous book, The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, published in Florence in 1550 and 1568; but Condivi's work has almost the authority of an autobiography, many phrases are in the same words, as certain letters in the hand of Michael Angelo still in existence, especially those relating to the early life and the ancestry of the master, to his favourite nephew Lionardo, and concerning the whole story of the Tragedy of the Tomb to Francesco Fattucci and others.
Condivi's description of his master's personal appearance is so detailed that we can see him with his sculptor's callipers measuring the head of his dear master, and gazing earnestly into his eyes, recording the colours of their scintillations, with the patience of a painter.
A second edition of the Vita di Michael Angelo, by Ascanio Condivi, was published at Florence in 1746. The introduction informs us that Condivi was born at Ripa Transona, and that he outlived his master ten years, dying on February 17, 1563 (1564), aged nearly eighty-nine years.
Since this book went to press, the author has seen an antique intaglio, No. 210 in the Estense Collection at Modena, which he is informed came from Ferrara in 1598, representing a Leda. This confirms the view expressed in the note on page 61, as to the genesis of the Leda by Michael Angelo, for it is exactly similar in composition.