MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI
religious orders were founded, the Capuchins, the Oratorians and
above all the Jesuits (1534). Now new saints arose, St. Ignatius
Loyola, St. Teresa, St. Philip Neri, St. Charles Borromeo. In 1542
the Inquisition was reintroduced, in 1543 literary censorship. In
1555 the Emperor Charles V abdicated and retired to the silence
of a Spanish monastery. A few years later his son, Philip II, began
his bleak and enormous palace of the Escorial, more a monastery
than a palace. Spanish etiquette stood for a discipline as rigid as
that of the early Jesuits and the Papal court of the same decades. In
Rome nothing seemed left of the Renaissance gaiety. The Venetian
ambassadors wrote home that even the carnivals were cold and lean.
Paul V, the strictest of the popes, had meat on his table only twice
a week.
Michelangelo too had always been exemplarily sober and self-
denying. He trained himself to need little sleep, and used to sleep
with his boots on. While at work he sometimes fed on dry bread,
eaten without putting his tools aside. He felt his duties to his genius
more heavily than the light-hearted architects of the Renaissance—
and he could therefore venture to reply to a critic who objected to
his having represented Giuliano de Mfedici on his tomb beardless,
though he wore a beard in life: "Who in a thousand years will care
for what he looked like ?" "a saying utterly impossible before the Re-
naissance had freed artists. For while the Middle Ages did not demand
portrait likeness, because it is part of what is merely accidental in
human nature, and while the early Renaissance had enjoyed portrait
likeness, because it had only just discovered the artistic means for
attaining it, Michelangelo refused to comply with it, because it
would have hemmed in his aesthetic freedom. Yet his religious ex-
perience was of the most exacting, and it grew more so as he grew
older and the century grew older, until he, the greatest sculptor
of the Westx and the most admired artist of his age, gave up
painting and sculpture almost entirely. Architecture alone he still
carried on, and he refused to accept a salary for his workat St. Peter's.
The final break seems to have come after he had passed his seven-
tieth year. Between the Medici buildings of the mid-twenties and
1547 he seems to have designed and built only the fortifications of
Florence in 1529—an engineering job, we would say, but a type of
job in which Leonardo da Vinci and San Gallo, his predecessor in
most of his Roman works, also excelled. In 1534 he had left
Florence for good and gone to Rome. In 1535 Pad IE appointed