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We might have further insight into these events did we possess more knowledge of the year that Michelangelo spent in Bologna after his first flight from Florence in 1494, when he thought there was some danger that the French might advance on the city. He lived in the house of the Bolognese nobleman, Aldovrandi.

Free of the paternalism of his home town, the young Michelangelo may well have exhibited in less tortured fashion his desire to please, to placate, to charm even, the ndercurrent of the later gloom, touchiness and revolt. It is no surprise that Leo X, the first Medici Pope, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, preferred to employ Raphael at his court. Leo spoke of Michelangelo as a brother, almost with tears in his eyes, since they were brought up together (in the Via Larga palace), wrote Sebastiano del Piombo to Michelangelo: ‘But’, he added, ‘you frighten everyone, even Popes.’ Leo is reported to have said of Michelangelo, ‘He is terrifying, one can’t get on with him’.Ludovico, we feel, may have said the same. The unreliability of patrons, if only their unpunctuality in financial matters, often echoed the character of the father. As time went on Michelangelo was fearful of his own crustiness in minor matters. His distaste for chatter and conventional compliments was not kept to himself: in the 1540’ s in Rome, he would sometimes ask his friend Luigi del Riccio to be polite on his behalf to an important person, or to return thanks for him.

The final patrons were the Popes, who entrusted him with the rebuilding of St. Peter’s as well as with the frescoes of the Last Judgment and of the Paoline chapel. When he was appointed
architect-in-chief in 1547, he would not accept a salary for St. Peter’s: through the Pope’s mediation he was now employed by God; and although for reasons of policy, his interests or properties in Florence in chief, he gave polite consideration to the entreaties of the ruling Medici, Duke Cosimo, although he hankered after his native town, even sometimes fooled himself about his return when writing to his nephew or to Vasari, he was mainly committed to the unruly job of supervising St. Peter’s, surrounded by enemies who tried hard to dislodge him. Dedicated at last to a single, everlasting Patron, he could at an advanced age surmount the intrigue that perpetually harries the life of an impresario. The beatified Ludovico had joined with his Maker, and so, with the earthly vicar. There could be little question of principal service elsewhere.

Michelangelo had left Florence in quest of the good father. The bad and dangerous Medici tyrant, Duke Alessandro, was left behind: within three days of Michelangelo’s arrival in Rome, the Medici Pope Clement, for whom he had been working in the San Lorenzo chapel, died. Buonarroti republicanism was now much reinforced: it found expression not only in making common cause with the Florentine exiles in Rome but in his friendship during the earlier years with the reforming sect within the church of Vittoria Colonna. Yet he had been only a short time in Rome, while commanding the utmost favours of the new (though aged) Pope Paul III (who wanted to release him from arrangements concerning the Julian tomb that had been started by Clement), before he was planning to withdraw to a monastery near Genoa or to Urbino (Condivi) where he would be safe in the clutches of the much-feared Julian heirs.

On the other hand, prudent as well as panicky amid the uncertainties of patronage, during his Roman domicile Michelangelo would seem to have found, in the almost ontinuous Papal esteem, the possibilities of a positive relationship, unusually humble, as well as on rare occasions, familiar and perhaps contemptuous, through which his overcharged attitudes to paternal authority could become more bearable. Vasari reports that Michelangelo said: If life, bestowed by God, is good, then his other gift, death, must also be good. Michelangelo’s own life appears to have been a living death, except that his art is inexhaustible.

Melancholy was too extreme for happiness; nor did it allow him, even when circumstances were favourable, to be always employed on his art: but melancholy was constructive inasmuch as it drove him largely to counteract his strong persecutory anxiety in favour of the mournful impulsion to repair, to restore, to re-create, in favour of a preferable (in his case an inspired) kind of ‘madness’.And I think that this is the meaning of his wry boast when he wrote to his old friend Fattucci, sending him some of his poems: ‘You will say with truth’, wrote Michelangelo, ‘that I am old and mad: I tell you there is no better approach to sanity and balance than to be mad.