From the Humanym archive

Michelangelo to Giorgio Vasari, 1556

Michelangelo, in his eighties, tells Vasari that the death of his devoted servant Urbino, after twenty-six years, has taught him how to face his own death.

From Rome, February 23rd, 1556. To Messer Giorgio, my dear friend, in Florence.

Messer Giorgio, dear friend, — I find it difficult to write, yet in answer to yours I will send you a few lines. You know that Urbino is dead, for which I owe the greatest gratitude to God, although my loss is very heavy and my sorrow infinite. I am grateful, because while he lived he kept me alive, and in dying he has taught me how to die ; not unwillingly, but welcoming death. I had him with me for twenty-six years and I found him ever loyal and faithful ; and now that I have made him rich and had come to regard him as the staff and refuge of my old age he has been snatched from my sight, and I am left with the sole hope of seeing him again in Paradise. God has vouchsafed a sign thereof in his most tranquil death.

My living on in this treacherous world in the midst of so many vexations grieved him far more than the approach of his own end, although the better part of me has gone to the grave with him, and there remains only an endless sorrow. I commend myself to you and beg you, if it is not a trouble, to make my excuses to Messer Benvenuto [Cellini] for not having answered his letter, for my thoughts on the subject are so full of grief that I cannot write. Commend me to him, and I commend myself to you.

The 23rd day of February, 1556.

Your MICHELAGNIOLO BUONARROTI, in Rome.

Why this letter

Francesco di Bernardino d'Amadore, known as Urbino, served as Michelangelo's assistant and household companion for twenty-six years and died in early 1556. Giorgio Vasari, the painter and art historian who wrote Michelangelo's first biography, was a close friend Michelangelo had known for decades. Written when Michelangelo was eighty, the letter is restrained and formal by the conventions of the time, but its grief for Urbino is plain, and Michelangelo, already thinking about his own death eight years before it came, says Urbino's dying taught him how to die well himself.

Provenance

Author: Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)
To: Giorgio Vasari
Written: 23 February 1556, Rome
Source: Michelangelo: A Record of His Life as Told in His Own Letters and Papers, tr. Robert W. Carden (1913)
Rights: Public domain — Michelangelo died in 1564; this text follows Carden's 1913 translation.
Translation: From Italian by Robert W. Carden, 1913
Formatting: Paragraph breaks added for readability; the wording is unchanged.

From Michelangelo: A Record of His Life as Told in His Own Letters and Papers, translated by Robert W. Carden (1913).