Ghirlandaio.
There is a drawing in the Louvre of a faun's head, in pen and ink, by Michael Angelo, over a red chalk drawing by an inferior hand. It does not appear to be this drawing mentioned by Vasari, but a caprice possibly of the same period, in which the master has undertaken to draw a head with a pen, in which the projections and indentations of the profile shall contradict the outline of the conventional red chalk drawing below.
Vasari tells us that one of these pulpits had not been placed in its position in the church even when Michael Angelo's funeral service was held there in 1564, so it is quite likely that it was still in the workshop in 1489.
That is the Hellenic work of the degenerate Greeks in Italy: all that was to be seen in his day.
Page 10.
All the works of Michael Angelo, whether sculpture, painting, or drawing partake of the nature of bas-relief, that old Tuscan art developed to such good purpose by the Florentines. The marks of his chisel hatch out the forms and develop the planes just as the parallel strokes of his pen cut out the reliefs of his drawings from the paper. His method of sculpture in the round was that of a carver of bas-reliefs. He gradually cut away the background more and more until the relief was actually the highest relief possible, the round. Every piece of sculpture Michael Angelo executed is the better for a background, whether niche or wall, for they all partake of this bas-relief nature; and his paintings and drawings may every one of them be thought of as bas-reliefs, and so it is with all the works of the Florentines, his contemporaries and predecessors. Space and distance never entered into their calculations before the time of Piero di Cosimo and his pupil Andrea del Sarto, and even then with but indifferent results. They were all content with the flat bas-relief effects familiar to them in the gates of the Baptistry and the jewel-like decorations of the Campanile. Their favourite problem was the expression of force by form, and no art was so useful for that purpose as bas-relief, because of its fixed main lines of composition and its absolute power of expressing the detail of the action of muscle and bone.
Leonardo may have shown it to Vasari also as an early work of the master's; Condivi does not mention it.
The cast of an angel from this shrine at the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, is not from the one carved by Michael Angelo, nor is it of his school as the label states; it is probably by Nicolo del Arca. Michael Angelo's figure is the companion angel on the other side of the altar.
See p. 21.
Probably because it was dangerous to write to any member of the Medici family. It proves to us that Michael Angelo and Sandro Botticelli were on confidential terms.