The drunken god

Behind these walls stands the earliest great statue he made: a Bacchus who is drunk. The god leans off balance, a cup raised above his head and a gaze that settles on nothing, his body soft where a god ought to be hard. Michelangelo was twenty-one, and the man who commissioned the piece turned it down.

In these same rooms you'll find a bust of Brutus, the Roman who killed his ruler. Michelangelo began it after a duke in Florence had been murdered by a relative, and he left it half-finished, which with subjects like this was rarely an accident.

His crooked nose, visible in every portrait, came from a fight he got into as a teenager with a fellow pupil while they were copying frescoes. We pass that very spot on our walk through Oltrarno.

A few steps further the square opens up, with its row of statues along the facade.