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The Universal Mind. Rarely during his long life was Michelangelo allowed by his patrons to work on the sculptures of his own intention, yet even of downright distasteful commissions he sometimes managed to make sculptures as fine as any since the Greeks. His style, as many critics think and Author Papini agrees, sprang from the tension between Greek and Christian elements in his spirit, between the demand to express the wholly human and the utterly divine in one form. In the result, he peopled Italy with a private race of demigods, a little too human to worship, a little too divine to love, but beautiful and absolute as ideas cored out of the universal mind.
Michelangelo, to his grief, seems to have tried to live his private life on the same superhuman scale, with the result that he was in some ways simply inhuman, and in most ways miserably unhappy. Infatuated with the superhuman, he all too often despised individual human beings; Author Papini provides dozens of instances of the man's colossal rudeness. Once, when Michelangelo was 17, he sneered so effectively at some drawings by his fellow students that one of them, a strong-armed fellow named Torrigiano, smashed his nose for him. Disfigured, Michelangelo withdrew more & more from life into art.
Women, he did without almost entirely. Ascanio Condivi, his friend and biographer, says that he was "continent." Of marrying, Michelangelo said, "I have too much of a wife in my art." Aside from his art, Michelangelo's affections were centered on a few friends, some of them nobly prepossessing young men. Homosexuals have therefore claimed him as their own, but Biographer Papini utterly rejects the notion.
The last years of the great man's life were spent in the clutter of the rising St. Peter's, where he supervised the builders. Snappish and repulsive as an old brown toad, the ancient Michelangelo hopped about the Holy City with "no thought that is not shaped by death." One day, in the presence of a visitor, he dropped a lamp. "I am so old," he muttered, "that death often pulls me by the cape and bids me go with him; some day I too shall fall, like this lamp, and the light of life will be extinguished."
In his 89th year, the light went out. It took three funerals to exhaust the grief of Italy at his passing: one in Rome, two in Florence, where he was entombed in the church of Santa Croce.