Fra Sebastiano Del Piombo by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This is a brief dramatic excerpt from Longfellow's play *Michael Angelo*, where the renowned Renaissance painter Michelangelo hears someone come into his studio and, without looking back, asks who it is. This moment is electric — the artist is so immersed in his work that he hardly notices the world around him. The shortness of the piece emphasizes this: in just two lines, we experience the depth of his creative concentration.

Terse and concentrated. There's no embellishment—just a stage direction and two words of dialogue. The tone comes across as impatient, like someone speaking when the world intrudes on something that truly matters to them.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow spent his final years crafting *Michael Angelo*, a lengthy dramatic poem in three parts that reflects on the last decades of the Renaissance master's life. Published posthumously in 1883, Longfellow wrote it in his seventies, and it’s often seen as a thoughtful exploration of aging, artistic legacy, and the isolation that comes with genius. Fra Sebastiano del Piombo, a real Venetian painter, was a close friend of Michelangelo in Rome, and their friendship is well documented through letters. Longfellow drew inspiration from Giorgio Vasari's *Lives of the Artists* and other historical texts to include authentic figures in his drama. The fragment presented here features an opening exchange from a scene that sets up a dialogue between two old friends and fellow artists.