was ill-omened to erect such a tomb while he was still in the prime of youth, and they induced him to change his mind and to stop Michelangelo from the work. The artist’s calamity was doubled when the Pope refused to pay him what he owed him for the work he had done, so that he was compelled to travel to Florence, grieving, despairing of erring humanity and of the Pope’s treatment of him. His pain so overwhelmed him that he imagined the whole world wanted to rob him or to steal the models of his drawings; he shut himself away in his house and refused to answer the invitation of the Pope, who sent for him several times; then he yielded to his entreaty and insis-tence, after the Pope had confessed that “an artist in his service like Michelangelo is a blessing and a boon to the Vatican.” He returned to Rome on condition that the Pope meet him halfway, and the Pope did so; and Michelangelo went back to work and produced what astonished the old world and still astonishes the new.

Among the masterpieces he pro-duced at that time was his decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, on which he painted the figures of the twelve apostles. The paintings he made there will remain immortal for all time. When Pope Julius II died, he was entrusted with completing the tomb, and he spent twenty-three years at the work, in the course of which four popes died.

Writers are agreed that Michelangelo loved the beauty of the human body because he knew it through and through; but he did not carry these inclinations of his beyond that, to the satisfying of the sensual instinct in it, as did those who were incapable of appreciating the worth of beauty. Yet this did not prevent his enemies from making this conduct of his a pretext for attacking his worth and his dignity.

Condivi, who was Michelangelo’s contemporary and wrote about his life in 1553, says that he once heard him speak of love, and those

who listened with him to that talk understood that his opinion of it did not differ from Plato’s opinion. Condivi did not know Plato’s view of love; but he — who knew Michelangelo thoroughly and was bound to him by close ties — had heard him express his views in pure and noble words, sufficient to suppress in any young man the baser urges and to curb in him the sensual leanings, and this made him understand the meaning of Platonism in love.

One of the modern authors who have chronicled Michelangelo’s life wrote, describing the age and the time in which the great artist

returned to Rome: this was the age of surging spiritual impulses, when inclinations were drawn toward the youth of embodied manhood in the likes of Tommaso de’ Cavalieri; and from this there arose relationships which the historians have preferred to pass over in silence, prompted by the religious crisis that spends itself in beauty and in the love of it. This love of beauty and this passion for perfecting it appeared plainly in Michelangelo’s drawings, which later inspired in him his greatest poems of love.

This kind of love remained shrouded in concealment, the poets not daring to avow it openly in the

Nestlé Milk Flour

Three generations of beautiful babies

...have gained their health, their vigor, the firmness of their muscles, the strength of their bones and teeth, and the fine balance of their digestion from Nestlé Milk Flour, to which their mothers accustomed them. Nestlé Milk Flour has been produced for nearly a hundred years, in keeping with the progress of the science of nutrition. It is the object of the doctors’ confidence, and it deserves to be the object of yours, for it combines the utmost power of nourishment with the utmost speed of digestion.

Nestlé Milk Flour

FARINE LACTÉE NESTLÉ