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What ensued may best be reported in the narration which Torrigiano at a later time made to Benvenuto Cellini. "This Buonarroti and I used, when we were boys, to go into the Church of the Carmine to learn drawing from the chapel of Masaccio.
His next commission came from Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini, afterwards Pope Pius III. A contract was signed on June 5, 1501, by which Michael Angelo agreed to complete some fifteen statues of male saints within the time of three years, for the Piccolomini Chapel, in the Duomo of Siena. A Saint Francis was begun by Piero Torrigiano, and may have been finished by Michael Angelo.
It was there that his fellow-pupil, Pietro Torrigiano, who was always his enemy and a bully, broke his nose with one blow and flew to Rome from the rage of Lorenzo. It was when Michelangelo was seventeen that Lorenzo died, at the early age of forty-two, and although the garden still existed and the Medici palace was still open to the youth, the spirit had passed.
Whereupon that Spaniard, considering himself affronted, denounced Torrigiano as a heretic; on which account he was thrown into prison, and after being examined every day, and sent from one inquisitor to the other, he was finally judged to deserve the severest penalty.
And thus do Bandinelli and Torrigiano go clattering down the corridors of time hand in hand. Yet we know what the picture was, for various men who saw it recorded their impressions; but although many of the younger artists of Italy flocked to Florence to see it, and many copied it, only one copy has come down to us the one in the collection of the Earl of Leicester, at Holkham.
Her chantry is built of Caen stone, and the decoration is of Renaissance character. It is conjectured to be the work of the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who died in the prison of the Inquisition in Spain in 1522.
Torrigiano, then, whose Life we are now about to write, was a student in the garden with those named above; and he was not only powerful in person, and proud and fearless in spirit, but also by nature so overbearing and choleric, that he was for ever tyrannizing over all the others both with words and deeds.
Among those who studied the arts of design in that garden, the following all became very excellent masters; Michelagnolo, the son of Lodovico Buonarroti; Giovan Francesco Rustici; Torrigiano Torrigiani; Francesco Granacci; Niccolò, the son of Jacopo Soggi; Lorenzo di Credi, and Giuliano Bugiardini; and, among the foreigners, Baccio da Montelupo, Andrea Contucci of Monte Sansovino, and others, of whom mention will be made in the proper places.
This last figure was so beautiful that it led to his making another like it for the Duke of Arcus, who, in order to obtain it, made such promises to Torrigiano, that he believed that it would make him rich for the rest of his life.
Lorenzo gave him the desired office, and took the young stone-mason as one of the Medici family, and there the boy lived in the Palace, and Lorenzo acted toward him as though he were his son. The favor with which he was treated excited the envy of some of the other pupils, and thus it was that in sudden wrath Torrigiano struck him that murderous blow with the mallet.
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