Michelangelo Buonarotti, a famous
florentine sculptor and painter known internationally now for his superb marble larger-than-life statue 'David', now in the
accademia, Florence, and his recently restored ceiling frescoes at the
Capella sistina in
Rome, was to suffer a great blow early in his life.
As recorded by Giorgio Vasari, the young artist, then a student at the Ghirlandaio bottegha, was very much envied by his fellow artist students. One day, arousing the hatred of one called Pietro Torrigiani, he got into a fight, and the former punched Michelangelo very hard in the nose. In Torrigiani's own words -
"I dealt him such a blow on the nose that I felt the bone and the cartilage yield upon my fist as if they had been of crisp wafer. And so he'll go with my mark on him to his dying day."
For of course in those days they had no way to fix a broken nose.
Indeed, Michelangelo's nose was consequently so squashed for the rest of his life that his forhead seemed to overhang it.
Torrigiani was hated by the florentines after this incident, due to Michelangelo's popularity, and this probably drove him to work abroad, in England. According to Vasari, this fierce young Pietro got somehow involved with the Inquisition, and died of starvation shortly after imprisonment.