Michelangelo

Alone, of course, held the interest of his correspondents; they are anxious for him, and he is the family's chief breadwinner. Michelangelo wants his father's prayers as when he describes to Buonarroto, one of his younger brothers, the anxiety and difficulty about the casting of the Julius statue in Bologna , and the Pope's satisfaction with the model. (The father had asked to be informed when he should say prayers for the casting. All such arduous work is undertaken solely in order to help the family, he likes to tell them. ‘See that you keep alive', he writes to his father in 1512 at the time the Medici were returned to Florence and the father was fined. ‘And if you can't obtain the earthly honors of other citizens, it's enough that you have bread and live well with Christ and in poverty as I do here.'

Formerly the family had been a good deal richer: except for sometimes obtaining a small authority in government posts, the father would seem to have had no profession. When Michelangelo was seventy-three, he wrote to his young nephew asking him to tell a priest not to address letters to Michelangelo, Sculptor, because he is not known except as