LORENZO DE MEDICI
Michelangelo had started out well enough. At first it looked like he was going to be lucky. His first patron, Lorenzo de Medici, called precisely �the Magnificent�, is the one artists dream of.
He was a legendary patron of the arts. Not only did he love painting and sculpture but he could tell good from bad. He filled his garden in Florence with wonderful works of art. Many were ancient figures recently discovered�excavated�in Rome. The ancients were considered to be the best artists of all time and modern sculptors humbly modelled their work on these old samples. Lorenzo was sad that, as he saw it, sculpture had fallen so low in his time and could not rival the old works. Wherever he looked he saw bad craftsmanship, poor design.
So he decided to found a school where boys could learn the true principles of art and work under the guiding hand of a master. And he asked the custodian of his garden-museum, an old respected sculptor named Bertoldo, to teach the first �class� of boys who showed promise.
The school was set up right there in Lorenzo�s garden. To get students he asked around all the artists� workshops in town for apprentices who showed some special bent for sculpture. He would pay the boy�s master to release him from his contract. At the time Michelangelo was fifteen and apprenticed to a painter, and he was just what the Duke was looking for.
When he saw the old statues in the Duke�s garden Michelangelo just gaped. It would have been fun to watch him walk around those statues that first day�the day genius discovered its vocation. Another boy had begun to model some figures in clay that the old Bertoldo had given him as homework. Michelangelo grabbed some clay and started to do a figure of his own�he thought he could do it better. And a couple of days later he started to copy in marble the antique figure of a faun, though he had never held a chisel before. This very unusual enthusiasm, intelligence, and readiness to learn impressed the Duke so much that he decided to �adopt� Michelangelo�have him live with him in his palace and bring him up as a noble. Thereafter for about three years Michelangelo lived with the Duke�s own sons, wore their fine clothes (and a violet robe the Duke gave him), had meals with them and heard the lectures and leisure talk of their teachers, the best minds of the time.
That was patronage at its best. It was right out of a fairy tale: Michelangelo was whisked out of a workshop where he punched and joked with rude, ignorant boys like himself, and was gently put down down in the best school in Florence. It was better than a fairy tale, where the son of a rude peasant becomes a prince at the wave of a magic wand. For what about his manners and his speech? What about his general ignorance? In the Duke�s palace Michelangelo not only learned how to make statues but how to behave (as far as that was possible for the independent character of a genius). He became familiar with the manners of the aristocracy and took part in their discussions on art, literature, philosophy, and politics. It couldn�t have happened to a better boy.
He lived happily and profitably in the great Duke�s house for three wonderful years. Then the Duke suddenly died and that was the end of the fairy tale. Michelangelo had to go back home and live with his father. No patron anymore, no nice clothes and educated company. The hard facts of existence. He had to go out and see if he could find a block of marble to carve or somehow scare up a commission. He had a list of potential customers�he had made some powerful friends, such as Lorenzo�s son Piero, who became the new ruler of Florence. But Piero wasn�t the sensitive, generous patron of artists that his father had been; rather, he was the other kind of noble, the flipside to his dad. He ruled so cruelly and incompetently that everyone could see there would be some kind of revolt. And Michelangelo, sensing he would be caught in the middle if there were a coup, had to flee. He didn�t endorse Piero�s tyranny but he was considered a Medici loyalist because of his years in the house.
