Thus Michaelangelo found himself, in the days of the national republican awakening which followed in Florence on the news of the taking of Rome by the armies of Charles V. and the expulsion of the Medici, in the front rank of Florentine revolutionaries. The same man who, in ordinary times, advised the members of his family to flee from politics as they would from the plague was in such a state of excitement that he feared neither the one nor the other. He remained in Florence, where there was both the plague and the revolution. The epidemic seized his brother Buonarroto, who died in his arms. In October 1528 he took part in the deliberations concerning the defence of the city. On January 10, 1529, he was chosen in the Collegium of the Nove di milizia to superintend the work of fortifying it. On April 6 he was appointed, for one year, governatore generate and procuratore of the fortifications of Florence. In June he went to inspect the citadel of Pisa and the bastions of Arezzo and Leghorn. In July and August he was sent to Ferrara to examine the famous defences there and confer with the Duke – a great authority on fortifications.
Michaelangelo recognised that the most important strategical point of Florence was the hill of San Miniato, so he decided to make this position secure by means of bastions. But – why we know not – he met with opposition from the gonfaloniere Capponi, who sought to remove him from Florence. Michaelangelo, suspecting Capponi and the Medicean party of wishing to get rid of him, in order to prevent the defence of the city, took up his quarters at San Miniato and moved not an inch. But his unhealthy distrust welcomed all the rumours of treason which ever circulate in a besieged town, and which, on this occasion, were only too well founded. Capponi, suspected, had been replaced as gonfaloniere by Francesco Carducci; but they had appointed condottiere and governor-general of the Florentine troops the disquieting Malatesta Baglioni, who was later to deliver the city into the hands of the Pope. Michaelangelo foresaw the crime, and communicated his fears to the Seigniory. “The gonfaloniere Carducci, instead of thanking him, reprimanded him insultingly; he reproached him with always being suspicious and full of fear.” Malatesta heard of Michaelangelo’s denunciation. A man of his stamp stuck at nothing to get rid of a dangerous adversary, and, as general-in-chief, he was all-powerful in Florence. Michaelangelo thought that he was lost.
“I was, however, determined,”he wrote, “to await the end of the war without fear. But on Tuesday morning, September 21, some one came to the San Niccolo gate, where I was on the bastions, and whispered in my ear that if I wished to save my life I must no longer remain in Florence. He came with me to my house, ate with me, brought me horses and did not leave me until he had seen me outside Florence.”
Varchi, completing these particulars, adds that Michaelangelo “had twelve thousand gold florins sown in three shirts stitched in the form of petticoats, and that he fled from Florence, not without difficulty, by the Justice Gate, which was the least guarded, accompanied by Rinaldo Corsini and his pupil, Antonio Mini.”
“I know not whether it was God or the devil who urged me to the step,” wrote Michaelangelo a few days afterwards.
It was his habitual demon of insane terror. In what a state of fright he must have been, if it is true, as is related, that, stopping on the way at Castelnuovo at the house of the ex-gonfaloniere Capponi, he gave him such a shock by his narratives that the old man died a few days afterwards!
On September 23 Michaelangelo was at Ferrara. In his excitement he refused the hospitality which the Duke offered him at his castle and continued his flight. On September 25 he reached Venice. The Seigniory, informed of his arrival, sent two noblemen to him with instructions to place everything at his disposal of which he might be in need; but, ashamed and unsociable, he refused their offer and withdrew out of the way to Giudecca. He felt that he was not yet sufficiently far away. His idea was to flee to France. On the very day of his arrival in Venice he sent an anxious and trembling letter to Battista della Palla, the agent whom Francis I. had appointed in France for the purchase of works of art.