Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. When we turn from his art to his life we find a typical superman of the Renaissance. A tremendous worker, an almost savage egoist in his preoccupation with whatever task he had set his hand to, he is the epitome of his period. Fate and the record of his prowess brought him into contact with two other great men, Lorenzo de Medici and Pope Julius 2md, and the history of their relations is the history of Michelangelo's life. Among these giants, as one might imagine, things were not easy; and in a tempera ment as difficult as the Bounarroti's his masters and patrons found no easy protegee. The famous quarrel with Julius forms a magnificent vignette of the life of the Renaissance. Alongside the artistic difficulties which arose from the conflicting desires of the princes and popes who demanded Michelangelo's services, were those which came from the troubled political state, and here again we find the artist torn by conflicting loyalties. His temperamental repub licanism versus his love for the Lorenzi, his work for the Popes and for Florence, these things could only be accepted in a man whose every effort was so excellent that none could afford permanently to quarrel with him if his services could be bought by reconciliation. At one brief period his work and an engineer and master of fortifications at Florence made him the hero of the Republic.
