He honoured worthy men in every station. His purse was open to their necessities; he condoled with them in their afflictions, and lightened their oppressions by his sympathies and influence. To artists and men of talent his liberality was munificent. He neither loved money nor accumulated it. His gifts were the free-will offerings of his heart, and hence its dispensations were unaccompanied by a notoriety which sullies the purity of primary obligation, by exposing the nakedness of its object.
Conversing one day with his old and faithful servant, he said, “What will become of you, Urbine, if I should die?” “I must then seek another master” was the reply. “Poor fellow,” said Michael, “thou shalt not need another master,” and he gave him two thousand crowns. This was a large sum in those days: Vasari says such a donation would only have been expected from popes and great emperors. Michael afterwards procured him an appointment in the Vatican to take care of the pictures, with a monthly salary of six ducats; and preserving his regard for the old man, Michael, though at that time eighty-two years of age, sat up with him by night in his last illness. “His death has been a heavy loss to me,” he wrote to Vasari, “and the cause of excessive grief, but it has also been a most impressive lesson of the grace of God: for it has shown me, that he, who in his lifetime comforted me in the enjoyment of life, dying has taught me how to die; not with reluctance, but even with a desire of death. He lived with me twenty-six years, grew rich in my service, and I found him a most rare and faithful servant; and now that I calculated upon his being the staff and repose of my old age he is taken away, and has left me only the hope of seeing him again in paradise.”
Michael Angelo was never married. To one who lamented that he had no children to inherit his property, Michael answered, “My works must supply their place; and if they are good for any thing they will live hereafter. It would have been unfortunate for Lorenzo Ghiberti, had he not left the doors of S. Giovanni, for his sons and his nephews have long since sold and dissipated his accumulated wealth; but his sculpture remains, and will continue to record his name to future ages.” These “doors” were of bronze. When Michael was asked his opinion of them, he said they were fit to be the doors of paradise.
Throughout the poetry of Michael Angelo, of which there is much in existence, love is a pervading sentiment, though, without reference to any particular object. Condivi had often heard him discourse upon it as a passion platonically; and Mr. Duppa gives the following sonnet, translated from the Italian of Michael Angelo by Mr. Wordsworth, as exemplifying Michael’s turn of thought:
SONNET,
By Michael Angelo.
Yes! hope may with my strong desire keep pace,
And I be undeluded, unbetray’d;
For, if of our affections none find grace
In sight of Heaven, then wherefore hath God made
The world which we inhabit? Better plea
Love cannot have, than that in loving thee,
Glory to that eternal Peace is paid,
Who such divinity to thee imparts
As hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts.
His hope is treacherous only, whose love dies
With beauty, which is varying every hour;
But in chaste hearts, uninfluenced by the power
Of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower
That breathes on earth the air of Paradise.