ABSTRACT
We have seen that Michelangelo suffered increasingly from what may be called simply old age: he was almost eighty-nine when he died. His later years were saddened by the deaths of younger friends, not only Vittoria Colonna and Luigi del Riccio, but his faithful servant Urbino. He wrote Vasari in February 1556:
Master Giorgio, dear friend: I can write only with difficulty, but still as an answer to yours I shall say something. You know that Urbino is dead, which for me was a very great mercy of God, but my heavy hurt and infinite sorrow. The mercy is that, as in his life he kept me alive, dying he taught me to die, not against my will but welcoming death. I had him twenty-six years and found him most loyal and faithful, and now that I had made him rich and expected him to be a staff and refuge for my old age, he has been taken from me, and no hope is left me but to see him again in Heaven. And of this God has given a sign through the happiness with which he met death, and he was much more distressed than in his own dying at leaving me alive in this traitorous world …
