The suggestion may have been that the Sistine Chapel should become a Museum of Italian art, where all painters of eminence could deposit proofs of their ability, until each square foot of wall was covered with competing masterpieces.  But when Michelangelo heard of Bramante’s intrigues, he was greatly disturbed in spirit.  Having begun his task unwillingly, he now felt an equal or greater unwillingness to leave the stupendous conception of his brain unfinished.  Against all expectation of himself and others, he had achieved a decisive victory, and was placed at one stroke, Condivi says, “above the reach of envy.”  His hand had found its cunning for fresco as for marble.  Why should he be interrupted in the full swing of triumphant energy?  “Accordingly, he sought an audience with the Pope, and openly laid bare all the persecutions he had suffered from Bramante, and discovered the numerous misdoings of the man.”  It was on this occasion, according to Condivi, that Michelangelo exposed Bramante’s scamped work and vandalism at S. Peter’s.  Julius, who was perhaps the only man in Rome acquainted with his sculptor’s scheme for the Sistine vault, brushed the cobwebs of these petty intrigues aside, and left the execution of the whole to Michelangelo.

There is something ignoble in the task of recording rivalries and jealousies between artists and men of letters.  Genius, however, like all things that are merely ours and mortal, shuffles along the path of life, half flying on the wings of inspiration, half hobbling on the feet of interest the crutches of commissions.  Michelangelo, although he made the David and the Sistine, had also to make money.  He was entangled with shrewd men of business, and crafty spendthrifts, ambitious intriguers, folk who used undoubted talents, each in its kind excellent and pure, for baser purposes of gain or getting on.  The art-life of Rome seethed with such blood-poison; and it would be sentimental to neglect what entered so deeply and so painfully into the daily experience of our hero.  Raffaello, kneaded of softer and more facile clay than Michelangelo, throve in this environment, and was somehow able—­so it seems—­to turn its venom to sweet uses.  I like to think of the two peers, moving like stars on widely separated orbits, with radically diverse temperaments, proclivities, and habits, through the turbid atmosphere enveloping but not obscuring their lucidity.  Each, in his own way, as it seems to me, contrived to keep himself unspotted by the world; and if they did not understand one another and make friends, this was due to the different conceptions they were framed to take of life the one being the exact antipodes to the other.

VI