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This letter, in which the uncle tells the nephew not to appear before him, not to write to him any more, calls to mind a letter Michelangelo wrote to his father twenty-one years before. Instead of Reverendissimo or Carissimo Padre, the missive opens with the one word, Ludovico. After arguing in a patient tone about a business matter concerning which he says he entirely fails to understand what else the (muddle-headed and accusing) father could want in the affair, Michelangelo goes on: ‘If it is that you find my very existence tiresome, you have hit on a way to satisfy yourself and to return that key to a treasure which you say I command: and you will do well: after all, everyone in Florence knows what a rich man you are, how that I have always robbed you and deserve punishment: you will be applauded.

So, tell everyone just what you please about me, but don’t write to me any more because you stop me working.’ But it must be considered doubtful, even here, whether the bitter tone has precedence over the desire to calm the father’s accusing fancies, to make amend even with ridicule. There is an extraordinary letter wherein a sardonic but desperate humility accompanies the expression of his own very strong feelings of persecution. ‘Dearest father, I was astonished by the news of you the other day when I didn’t find you at home: and now that I gather you are upset with me and say I have turned you out, I wonder the more.

For I am certain that from the day I was born until now I have always had the intention both in big things and small to please you, and always the labours I have undergone were out of love for you. . . . It amazes me that you so quickly forget all this, you with your sons who have had me on trial for more than thirty years. And, of course, you know well that I have always schemed and done the best for you whenever opportunity occurred.

How then can you go about saying I drove you away? Don’t you see what harm you are doing me? Together with the other miseries I endure for other reasons, this completes my bitterness, and all this misery is the fruit of my love for you. You certainly repay me well! But let it be as you say. I want to persuade myself that what I have always done is shameful and harmful: and so, as if I had done it, I ask your forgiveness. Try to forgive your son who has always lived badly and done all the evils that are possible in this world.

Once again, I ask you to forgive me, the wretch that I am, and spare me the harm of your spreading the story that I drove you out. It hurts me more than you think. I am, you see, your son.’ The fear of losing each other, we have said, is the dominant emotional theme in the family letters. ‘Men are worth more than money.’ In the face of political dangers, Michelangelo writes, ‘Be the first to flee’. ‘Think only of keeping alive’ (and not about wealth), he urges his father. ‘I wouldn’t exchange your life for all the gold in the world.’ Anxiously he tries to counteract with religious exhortation and common sense the father’s patent persecutory fears whose opposite face sometimes seems to be a certain inconsequence.

When the father is ill, though out of immediate danger, Michelangelo implores Buonarroto (who has already shown the utmost concern in telling Michelangelo) to make provision and to employ his wife in aid of Ludovico. He, Michelangelo, will make it up to all of them: the fount of all his effort had always been for the help of his father before he should die. (It would seem he could never entirely convince himself that he has been successful: perhaps Buonarroto’s wife could do better.) He is very anxious—as he showed himself again over the deaths of his brothers—that if, by chance, there should be a relapse, his father would not lose the advantage of the last sacraments to promote his celestial living. ‘I have always schemed to revive our family’, he wrote much later to his nephew, ‘but I did not have brothers whom it was possible to raise up.’ The bitterness, I think, was more sorrowful than the usual feeling of failure to satisfy family pride.

There had been insufficient proof for his own satisfaction that his father and brothers had exploited him successfully. He hated to be exploited and he knew them to be worthless: in any case, his feeling of persecution was very strong: even so, he preferred to make every anxious sacrifice in order to simulate an eternity for his family’s motherless life, to secure their slipping existence. Nothing would be enough, nothing could convince him he had done enough, so profound was the melancholy guilt that centred on them, particularly on the father.