Possibly in the Duke's collection there may have been an antique gem engraved with the story of Leda which influenced Michael Angelo in his choice of this classical subject for the picture he painted for the Duke.
The best version of this picture is in one the offices of the National Gallery, London; it is probably the much restored original which was supposed to have been destroyed by order of M. Desnoyers. See p. 204.
Francis I.
Afterwards Cardinal Pole, Papal Legate in the time of King Henry VIII. and Queen Mary I., born at Stourton Castle, Staffordshire, 1500; died November 18, 1558.
The Slaves, now in the Louvre, Paris.
The ox, in Italian banter, appears to have taken the position of the ass with us in England, as a dull, heavy beast, a fool. Michael Angelo's answer was, as it were: "It is according to the asses you mean; if it be these asses of Bolognese doubtless they are much bigger; if ours of Florence they are much smaller. You are bigger asses in Bologna than we are in Florence."
Piero Torrigiano gave his version of the affair to Benvenuto Cellini long afterwards: "This Buonarroti and I used, when we were boys, to go into the Church of the Carmine to learn drawing from the Chapel of Masaccio. It was Buonarroti's habit to banter all who were drawing there, and one day, when he was annoying me, I got more angry than usual, and, clenching my fist, I gave him such a blow on the nose that I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath my knuckles; and this mark of mine he will carry with him to his grave." Cellini adds—"These words begat in me such hatred of the man since I was always gazing at the masterpieces of the divine Michael Angelo, that, although I felt a wish to go with him to England, I now could never bear the sight of him."
Torrigiano worked for Henry VIII. of England in Henry VII. chapel, Westminster, and at Hampton Court. Afterwards he went to Spain and came to a bad end there, as Condivi says. He died in the prisons of the Inquisition, he had been condemned for destroying a figure of the Madonna of his own carving; his patron paid him insufficiently, so he went to the house, hammer in hand, and destroyed the statue, with this unfortunate result. He starved himself to death in prison as a worse fate awaited him. See Vasari.
Can this refer to the Second Edition of "The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects," by the kindly Giorgio Vasari?
--The Temptation of Saint Anthony, from the engraving by Martin Schongauer.