I Sucked In Chisels And Hammers

Giorgio Vasari records this remark in Lives of the Artists as something Michelangelo said jokingly to him directly, explaining his gift for sculpture by the fact that as an infant he was nursed by a stonecutter's wife in Settignano, near Florence, where his father owned a marble quarry. The humor rests on a genuine Renaissance belief that a wet nurse could transmit her traits and skills through breast milk. Vasari also notes that the village of Settignano was "full of quarries of grey-stone" and produced many stonecutters and sculptors — giving the joke a local color that Vasari, himself from the Aretine region, would have appreciated.