The Lord God in His goodness long preserve him to us, for without doubt the same day will end his life and his labours, as is written of Socrates.

His active and vigorous old age gives me firm hope that he has many years to live, as also the long life of his father, who lived to ninety-two years without knowing what it was to have a fever, and then dying more for lack of resolution than for any illness; so that when he was dead, as Michael Angelo relates, his face retained the same colour that he had when living, appearing rather asleep than dead.
LVI.

From a child Michael Angelo was a hard worker, and to the gifts of nature added study, not using the labours and industry of others, but, desiring to learn from nature herself, he set her up before him as the true example.

There is no animal whose anatomy he did not desire to study, much more than that of man; so that those who have spent all their lives in that science, and who make a profession of it, hardly know so much of it as he.

I speak of such knowledge as is necessary to the arts of painting and sculpture, not of other minutiae that anatomists observe.