The Life of Michael Angelo Author:Romain Rolland Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II SHATTERED STRENGTH Roct' 6 l'alta cholonna.1 Michael Angelo terminated this herculean task, glorious but shattered. Through having to hold his head thr... more »own back for months, whilst painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, " he injured his sight to such an extent that for a long time afterwards he could neither read a letter nor look at an object unless he held them above his head, in order to see them better." He himself joked about his infirmities : " Labour has given me a goitre, as water does to the cats of Lombardy . . . My stomach points towards my chin, my beard turns towards the sky, my skull rests on my back and my chest is like that of a harpy. The paint from my brush, in dripping on to my face, has made a many-coloured pattern upon it. My loins have entered intomy body and my posterior counterbalances. I walk in a haphazard manner, without being able to see my feet. My skin is extended in front and shortened behind. I am bent like a Syrian bow. My intelligence is as strange as my body, for one plays an ill tune on a bent reed."3 1 "Poems," i. Vasari. 3 " Poems,"ix. (See Appendix, ii.) This poem, written in the burlesque style of Francesco Berniand addressed to Giovanni da Pistoja, is dated by Frey June- July 1510. Michael Angelo alludes in the final lines to the difficulties he has encountered in painting the Sistine frescoes, and he makes excuse for them on the ground that this is not his profession. " Therefore, Giovanni, defend my dead work, and defend my honour ; for painting is not part of my business. I am not a painter." We must not be deceived by this good humour. Michael Angelo could not endure being ugly. To a man like himself, appreciating physical beauty more than any one, ugliness was a disgrace.1 We find traces of his humiliat...« less