Page "Michelangelo" Paragraph 40

In his personal life, Michelangelo was abstemious.

He told his apprentice, Ascanio Condivi: " However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man.

" Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating " more out of necessity than of pleasure " and that he " often slept in his clothes and ...

boots.

" These habits may have made him unpopular.

His biographer Paolo Giovio says, " His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him.

" He may not have minded, since he was by nature a solitary and melancholy person, bizzarro e fantastico a man who " withdrew himself from the company of men.

" Nor was he by nature libidinous: when an employee of his friend Niccolò Quaratesi offered his son as apprentice, suggesting that he would be good even in bed, Michelangelo refused indignantly, suggesting Quaratesi fire the man.