III. Belonging to the year 1506, when Michael Angelo quarrelled with
Julius and left Rome in anger. The tree referred to in the last line is
the oak of the Rovere family.
IV. Same date, and same circumstances. The autograph has these words at
the foot of the sonnet: _Vostro Miccelangniolo, in Turchia._ Rome
itself, the Sacred City, has become a land of infidels.
V. Ser Giovanni da Pistoja was Chancellor of the Florentine Academy.
The date is probably 1509. The _Sonetto a Coda_ is generally humorous
or satiric.
VI. Written in one of those moments of _affanno_ or _stizzo_ to which
the sculptor was subject. For the old bitterness of feeling between
Florence and Pistoja, see Dante, _Inferno._
VII. Michael Angelo was ill during the summer of 1544, and was nursed
by Luigi del Riccio in his own house, Shortly after his recovery he
quarrelled with his friend, and wrote him this sonnet as well as a very
angry letter.
VIII. p. 38. Cecchino Bracci was a boy of rare and surpassing beauty
who died at Rome, January 8, 1544, in his seventeenth year. Besides
this sonnet, which refers to a portrait Luigi del Riccio had asked him
to make of the dead youth, Michael Angelo composed a series of forty-eight
quatrains upon the same subject, and sent them to his friend Luigi.
Michelangelo the younger, thinking that _'l'ignoranzia degli uomini ha
campo di mormorare,'_ suppressed the name Cecchino and changed _lui_ into
_lei._ Date about 1544.
IX. Line 4: 'The Archangel's scales alone can weigh my gratitude
against your gift.' Lines 5-8: 'Your courtesy has taken away all my
power of responding to it. I am as helpless as a ship becalmed, or a
wisp of straw on a stormy sea.'
X. Michael Angelo, when asked to make a portrait of his friend's
mistress, declares that he is unable to do justice to her beauty. The
name _Mancina_ is a pun upon the Italian word for the left arm,
_Mancino_. This lady was a famous and venal beauty, mentioned among the
loves of the poet Molsa.