Il Carteggio indiretto di Michelangelo, vol. 2.

Most of the letters in this latest volume of correspondence by, to, and about Michelangelo (an exemplary project of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento) are addressed to the artist's nephew Leonardo. After Michelangelo's departure in the wake of the Siege this young man, whose marriage to Cassandra Ridolfi consummated the family's political rehabilitation, became head of the household in Florence. As Ristori indicates in his brief introduction, the tone is more formal than in earlier volumes. But Michelangelo is everywhere present, both alive and dead.

The courtier Vasari, calling himself a zero cancellato, claims that Michelangelo would like his name perpetuated through the baptism of a great-nephew as Michelangelo in his own lifetime. Mariottini also urges Leonardo to produce an heir quickly so that Michelangelo will not give everything away to charity. Leonardo obliged, but, in more typical Florentine fashion, did not name a son after his uncle until after the latter's death. At fifteen the young Michelangelo di Leonardo could recite 650 lines of Virgil, though, according to Francesco Bocchi, he needed encouragement.

Sebastiano Malenotti and Lorenzo Mariottini press Leonardo to keep his uncle happy with family news. We are given a picture of melancholic old age, in which upsets are felt disproportionately. One can only imagine how many fantasie beset Michelangelo in 1563 after the murder of Cesare Bettini, who had been caught in bed with the wife of the Bishop of Forli's cook. Michelangelo contracted influenza in the epidemic of 1562 and his insistence on going out for a walk in the rain shortly before his death is a familiar story of old age that cannot find peace: apart from finishing a limewood crucifix for Leonardo, he saw no reason for living.

Much documentation concerns food and wine, as well as the value and color of cloth. Black, as dyers know, is the most difficult, and in 1578 Diomede Leoni laments that hardly any Florentines in Rome can distinguish greenish from reddish black any more.

Important letters concern St. Peter's, especially those in which Mariottini seeks the dimensions of the diameter of the inside and outside of the cupola of S. Maria del Fiore and its campanile. In 1559 Antonio Barberini sends the model of the staircase for the Biblioteca Laurenziana, elliptically asking Leonardo to get it to "quello che soprasta in detta fabrica." In a typically brief but valuable note Ristori informs us that this was Ammanati. The remaining correspondence refers to Michelangelo's funeral, his tomb, and the disposition of his unfinished works (including the St. Peter), and of personal items, such as a large mirror that cannot be found.

The personalities of a few later correspondents stand out. Diomede Leoni asks Leonardo to send him some of the best white beans for his garden in San Quirico d'Orcia. In 1568, enclosing a collection of epitaphs for Michelangelo's tomb, Leoni writes that he has written them out in letters of different sizes in the ancient manner so that they will be more pleasing to the eye. In his orto he keeps the imagine vera of Michelangelo (based on a death mask and cast in bronze by Daniele da Volterra) to which he has added an epitaph of his own. This Tuscan retreat, with its beans, sculpture and epitaph, was reminiscent of an earlier age. The prevailing image of Michelangelo was to be fashioned instead by Vasari, the Accademia del Disegno, and by that other Michelangelo who was ready to read Livy in 1583.

ELIZABETH CROPPER Johns Hopkins University