Michelangelo

e ideas of Savonarola. The impassive Virgin with the robust child--the bas-relief in bronze of the Casa Buonarroti--is far more a school piece by a pupil of Donatello than a religious work. What we know of the little wooden crucifix, carved in 1494 for the prior of the Convent of S. Spirito, shows us the artist without mysticism and with a passion for the observation of nature, who was eagerly studying anatomy from corpses until their putrefaction made him ill and forced him to stop. At Bologna, where he lived in 1449 after his flight from Florence, and where he heard of the results of Savonarola's preachings--the expulsion of the Medici, the death of Pico della Mirandola and of Poliziano and the scattering of the little circle of Florentine poets and philosophers--he spent his time in reading Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante to his protector, the noble Gianfrancesco Aldovrandi, and when he worked at the Arca (tabernacle) of S. Domenico it was to carve that athletic angel, superb and expressionless, which contra