Varchi said to him one day, "Signor Buonarroti, avete il cervello di Giove." Michelangelo answered, "Si vuole il martello di Vulcano per farne uscire qualche cosa." (Quoted by E. Delacroix in his Journal, Vol. II, p. 429.)
[155] Michelangelo said to Cardinal Salviati, who was ministering to him on his death-bed, that he only regretted two things: not to have done all he should have for his salvation, and to be dying just as he was learning the alphabet of his profession. (Journal de Bernin, Vol. XXI, p. 388.)
[156] Vasari, "Vite," Preamble to the Third Part.
Lionardo spent six years in painting some hair, but Corregio only an hour, and with four strokes of his brush gained just the same effect. (Journal de Bernin, Vol. XX, p. 453.)
[157] He went so far as to canonise himself while he was still alive, after a vision in which he saw a miraculous aureole around his own head.
Nothing shows more surely the gulf which separated Michelangelo from his disciples than the comparison of his sombre poetry with the proudly exultant sonnet which serves as preamble to the memoirs of Cellini.
[158] See what Vasari writes of the revolution of Giorgione in 1507 when Giorgione began to "pose before him living and natural things, to represent them as nearly as he could by painting directly with colour without making any drawing." He adds that Giorgione did not perceive that it is necessary, if you wish to arrange and balance a composition, to put it first on paper. "In fact the mind can not very well see or perfectly imagine its own creations, if it does not reveal and explain its thought to the eyes of the body which will aid it in judging—we must add that in drawing on paper one succeeds in filling the mind with beautiful conceptions and learns to make natural objects from memory without being obliged to have them always before you." (Vasari, Ed. 1811, Vol. III, pp. 427-428.) The whole point of view of Florentine art of the sixteenth century is in this naïve avowal.
[159] Tintoretto had long studied Michelangelo. He had brought to him at great expense casts of his statues which Ridolfo says he lighted by a lamp and drew in bold relief. (Ridolfo; "Delle maraviglie dell' arte in Venetia," 1648.)
[160] This fever attacked the art of other countries which were filled with caricatures of Michelangelo, Maarten van Heemskerck, "the Dutch Michelangelo," Frans Floris, "the Flemish Michelangelo," and their innumerable followers, not to mention the French and Spanish imitators, the Fréminets and the Cespedès.