Michelangelo - Personal Life

Personal Life

In his personal life, Michelangelo was abstemious. He told his apprentice, Ascanio Condivi: "However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man." Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating "more out of necessity than of pleasure" and that he "often slept in his clothes and ... boots." These habits may have made him unpopular. His biographer Paolo Giovio says, "His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him." He may not have minded, since he was by nature a solitary and melancholy person, bizzarro e fantastico a man who "withdrew himself from the company of men." Nor was he by nature libidinous: when an employee of his friend Niccolò Quaratesi offered his son as apprentice, suggesting that he would be good even in bed, Michelangelo refused indignantly, suggesting Quaratesi fire the man.