Michelangelo died in Rome on 18 February 1564, late in the afternoon, a few weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday. A fever took him over a few days, and no one who wrote about it named a disease.
He lived in a modest house near Trajan's Forum and, by the account of his friend Giorgio Vasari, kept working until the end. The last statue he touched was still standing unfinished in that house when he died.
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The fever explains how he died. It does not explain the weeks that followed, when two rulers had already settled what they meant to do with him. About a year before Michelangelo died, Vasari himself, by his own account, went to Duke Cosimo de' Medici, who ruled Florence, and secretly won him over to a plan. The duke was to ask the pope, through the duke's ambassador in Rome, to keep a close watch on the old man's household. If Michelangelo died suddenly, everything in his house, the drawings, the models, the money, was to be listed and secured.
The pope, Pius IV, meant to give Michelangelo a memorial and a tomb in St. Peter's. Cosimo had never managed to bring Michelangelo to Florence alive, and he meant to bring him there dead. So Michelangelo lay in a Roman church, held by one city and wanted by another, and three weeks passed before he reached the city where, his friends said, he had asked to be buried.
What You'll Discover
What he was still carving.
Who was missing at the end.
How he left Rome.
What the coffin showed.
What Florence did with him.