Note *71 — Chapter XXIV
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Francesco da Urbino, who was certainly Michelangelo's schoolmaster, does not seem to be the same as his friend Francesco Urbino, so touchingly spoken of in the following letter from Michelangelo to Vasari:—
"Messer Giorgio, Dear Friend,—Although I write but badly, yet will I say a few words in reply to yours. You know that Urbino is dead, for which I owe the greatest thanks to God; at the same time my loss is heavy and sorrow infinite. The grace is this, that while Urbino living kept me alive, in dying he has taught me to die not unwillingly but rather with a desire for death. I had him with me twenty-six years, and always found him faithful and true. Now that I had made him rich and thought to keep him on the staff and rest of my old age he has departed, and the only hope left me is that of seeing him again in Paradise, and of this God has given a sign in his most happy death. Even more than dying, it grieved him to leave me alive in this treacherous world, with so many troubles; the better part of me went with him, nothing is left to me but endless sorrow. I commend myself to you....
"Your Michael Angelo Buonarroti, in Rome.
"The 23 day of February, 1556."
See Le Lettere, No. CDLXXV., p. 539, in Brit. Museum, and Holroyd, Michael Angelo (Duckworth, 1903), p. 255.
It was this Urbino's brother who was Raphael's well-known pupil, Il Fattore. Cf. also Holroyd, op. cit., pp. 273 and 314.