INTRODUCTION

On Friday 18 February 1564, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine patrician and 'divine' sculptor, painter and architect, lay dying in Rome in a part of the city called Macello dei Corvi. It was a small house with a few of the ground-floor rooms converted into workshops, a forge for making tools and a kitchen. The bedrooms were on the first floor.

Five days earlier on Carnival Monday, someone had seen the little old man, hatless and dressed in black, walking in the rain that chilled the city. They had recognized him, but did not have the courage to approach him. They notified Tiberio Calcagni, a pupil who looked after him like a son, but he too did not find it easy to persuade the famous artist to return home. He would not hear of taking a rest: his aches and pains, he said, gave him no respite. He attempted to ride his black pony, as he always did when the weather permitted, and he started to panic when he realized that he couldn't manage it and would never be able to ride again. Although he had been expecting death for decades, now that it had arrived with that cold rain, he was frightened just as we all are - even those of us who, like him, have lived far into old age. He slowly yielded to death in the care of another pupil, Daniele da Volterra. For two days he waited in an armchair by the fire, and then in his bed for three more. As the angelus rang out on Friday morning, a still alert Michelangelo died in the care of Tommaso de'Cavalieri, Diomede Leoni and Daniele da Volterra.

Macello dei Corvi was a part of Rome close to the Foro Romano, the Foro Imperiale and the slopes of the Quirinale. Drawings of antiquities by travellers and scholars provide us with a very clear idea of the area the artist's house overlooked at the time: it was an uncultivated countryside from which the skeletons of antiquity's greatest monuments emerged. The greatest of all these was the Coliseum, that mountain made of travertine stone and riddled with holes, whose base was still buried and whose arches and vaults had turned into caves that were home to a great variety of precarious lives. Then there were the great triumphal arches, which were also half submerged in the ground, and on cold days like the ones that brought Michelangelo's life to an end, the sheep and cows huddled around them to shelter from the rain, and pressed against the marble reliefs sculpted to commemorate the eternal glory of the emperors. The huge columns of the Temple of Saturn rose above the ruins and the ancient trees that grew there, and were crowned by the white marble of the entablatures miraculously suspended in the sky.

The neighbourhood in which Michelangelo lived bordered the level area of the Fori to the north and marked the beginning of the medieval and Renaissance city. It was hardly one of the elegant sites of the new Rome. It was almost countryside, with vegetable gardens and vineyards that found their way in amongst the ruins of the ancient city - the same ruins that Michelangelo had studied and drawn on his arrival from Florence sixty years earlier, under the careful tutelage of the venerable Sangallo. For at least a century, the papal strategy had been to concentrate the 'rebirth' of the city of Rome on its other side, where the Tiber forms a tight bend between Castel Sant'Angelo and Tiberine Island. Since the final years of the fifteenth century, Italy's best architects had been attempting to revive ancient architecture. Of course, they had to make do with resources that were infinitely more restricted than those of the ancient Romans, but their ingenuity had overcome this obstacle, which in many ways had encouraged creativity. Raphael, Bramante, Peruzzi and the Sangallo family were all excellent artists whom Michelangelo had known and who had since died, and they had built palazzi in that area which looked as if they had been there since antiquity. These white buildings decorated with columns and rustication were impressive additions to the wide and straight avenues that open a breach in the maze of insalubrious alleys which Romans crowded into throughout the Middle Ages, like a shipwrecked people who had adapted themselves to life in the wreckage of a vast ship.

None of these new buildings could be found on the streets around Michelangelo's house. The only town-planning measures that had been taken were those of Paul III, who demolished the shacks that clustered around Trajan's Column, the giant trunk of marble on which bas-reliefs depicted the deeds of the Roman emperor. He did this to impress another emperor, Charles V, who came in 1536 to stage a triumphal ride into Rome following a victory over the Turkish admiral at Tunis. With a very modern sense of theatricality, Paul III decided to free the city's ancient monuments of the clutter that surrounded them, in the certain knowledge that this would have made a strong impression on the visitor who was susceptible to the power of ceremony.

Otherwise Macello dei Corvi was an unassuming part of Rome, to say the least. The houses were mainly on two floors, and pressed together so that there was no room for courtyards. They were built from the debris lying in the corpse of the ancient city: badly cut tufa rock from the Viterbo area was mounted on lines of Roman bricks taken from the old walls, and sculpted blocks of peperino or travertine were cemented and used as cornerstones, thresholds and lintels for doors and windows, without a care for the sophisticated bas-reliefs on their surfaces. Occasionally this dubious hotchpotch of building materials had the protection of a plaster made from volcanic ash, which was livid red or purple depending on the quarry it came from - almost always a vineyard just inside the Aurelian Walls.

Michelangelo came to live in this poor area of Rome around 1510, when Julius II or his heirs had provided him with that house and workshop so that he could work on the sculptures for the planned tomb of the great Della Rovere pope. He left Rome in 1517, only to return there in 1533 as a now world-famous artist. During the years that followed, his financial and social advancement never ceased, and yet he never left that squalid house so distant from the centre of the papal court. His continued presence in that district on the then outskirts of Rome demonstrates how he never wanted to integrate into a city where, for thirty years, he essentially felt himself to be a Florentine exile.

Even the circumstances of his death were typical of an exile, in spite of his undoubted fame. The short illness that broke him came without warning. One morning at the beginning of the previous October, he turned up at the church square of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in excellent health and in the company of his faithful servants, Antonio del Francese and Pier Luigi da Gaeta. He may have gone to attend mass, but was certainly interested in taking another look at his beloved Pantheon, the best preserved building from antiquity, which alone, in his opinion, demonstrated the unattainable beauty of which Roman builders had been capable. In the square in front of the church he was recognized and greeted reverentially by another Florentine, Miniato Pitti, who later described the old artist as a man who 'goes around with a stoop and can hardly lift his head, and yet he stays at home and continuously works away on his sculpting'.1 Almost ninety years old, Michelangelo was still working. And he was not working with his pencil, but with his chisel.

The vigorous old man who came to that meeting in the church square of Santa Maria sopra Minerva on horseback would die four months later in his miserable home in Macello dei Corvi. He died alone, without the presence of a single one of his relations for whom he had worked and saved all his life - not his nephew Leonardo, whom he had loved but kept at a distance, in Florence, because he hated the idea of his nephew awaiting his death to take possession of his wealth. And yet Leonardo could count upon that wealth, as one of the principal aims of Michelangelo's had been to make the Buonarroti line rich and respected.

Although historians would attempt to transform Michelangelo Buonarroti into a mythical figure much accustomed to the luxury of the princes he served, the circumstances of his death, so carefully chronicled by the witnesses to it, tell of a fierce and irredeemable conflict between the artist and the rest of the world. The only exceptions were a few simple people who he allowed to look after him and Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a Roman nobleman that Michelangelo had loved too much to refuse his presence during the last days of his life. The account provided by these people detailed his agony hour by hour, and this made it difficult to create romantic interpretations that could shroud him in the mystery and greatness of which legends are made.

For Michelangelo, as is often the case, the circumstances of his death were extremely revealing. Like everyone facing death, he was not prepared for it and begged like a child never to be left on his own, even for a second. But as soon as it arrived in his extremely modest home, death discovered another weakness in this man: the avarice that afflicted him all his life. A chest full of gold, sufficient to buy the whole of Palazzo Pitti, was hidden under his bed. He trusted no one, not even the banks. He always feared deceit, persecution and fraud. He lived like a wretch, while accumulating money in a wooden chest under his bed. The man who was the object of veneration during his life should have provided his public with another death - one that did not involve a...