UNIVERSAL disgust of things and of himself threw him into the Revolution, which broke out in Florence in 1527.
Up to that time Michaelangelo had shown in political matters the same indecision of mind from which he ever suffered in his life and in his art. Never did he succeed in conciliating his personal opinions with his obligations towards the Medici. This violent genius was, moreover, ever timid in action; he would not run the risk of struggling against the powerful ones of this world on the ground of politics and religion. His letters show him to have been ever anxious over himself and the members of his family, fearing to compromise himself and denying the bold words which he sometimes uttered in a first movement of indignation against some act of tyranny. At every moment he was writing to his family to tell them to take care, to keep silent, and flee at the first alarm.
“Act as you would in plague time – be the first to flee... Life is worth more than fortune...Remain in peace, make no enemy, confide in no one save God, and say neither good nor evil of any one, for we know not the end of things. Occupy yourself solely over your business...Meddle with nothing.”
His brothers and friends laughed at his disquietude and said that he was crazy.
“Do not laugh at me,”replied the saddened Michaelangelo; “one ought not to laugh at any one.”
There was nothing, indeed, to laugh over in the perpetual agitation of this great man. He was rather to be pitied for his wretched nerves, which made him the victim of terrors against which he struggled in vain. All the more merit was due to him, on recovering from these humiliating attacks, for forcing his sick body and mind to face the danger, from which it was his first impulse to flee. Moreover, he had more reason to fear than another, for he was more intelligent, and, with his pessimistic outlook, he saw but too clearly the misfortunes which were about to fall on Italy. But, to have allowed himself, naturally timid as he was, to be drawn into the Florentine Revolution he must have been at the height of despair, which revealed the bottom of his soul.
Michaelangelo’s soul, so timorously retired within itself, was ardently republican. We see this from the fiery words which, in confidential or feverish moments, sometimes escaped from him, particularly in the conversations which he had later with his friends Luigi del Riccio, Antonio Petreo and Donato Giannotti, and which the last named reproduced in his “Dialogues on the Divine Comedy.” The friends expressed astonishment that Dante should have placed Brutus and Cassius in the last degree of Hell and Caesar above. Michaelangelo questioned on the point, spoke in favour of tyrannicide:
“If you had attentively read the first cantos,” he said, “you would have seen that Dante knew the nature of tyrants only too well, and what punishments they deserved to receive from God and man. He places them among those who have been ‘violent against their neighbour,’ and punishes them in the seventh circle by plunging them into boiling blood...Since Dante recognised that, it is impossible to admit that he did not recognise that Caesar was the tyrant of his country and that Brutus and Cassius did right to massacre him. For he who kills a tyrant, kills not a man but a beast with human face. All tyrants are devoid of the love which every one ought to naturally feel for his neighbour. They are deprived of human inclinations; they are no longer, therefore, men but brutes. That they possess no love for their neighbour is evident, otherwise they would not have taken what belonged to others, and would not have become tyrants by trampling others under foot... It is therefore clear that he who kills a tyrant does not commit murder, since he kills not a man but a beast. Thus, Brutus and Cassius did not commit a crime in assassinating Caesar. Firstly, because they killed a man whom every Roman citizen, in accordance with the laws, was obliged to kill. Secondly, because they did not kill a man but a brute with a human face.”