to art, that you will use all diligence and assiduity, so far as your years permit, in pushing forward this noble work, and making it a living likeness of my lord, as well as worthy of your own unrivalled genius.  It is true that this will add nothing to the fame you now enjoy; yet it will at least augment your reputation for most acceptable and affectionate devotion toward myself and my ancestors, and prolong through centuries the memory of my lawful and sole love; for the which I shall be eager and liberal to reward you.”  It is probable that by this time (October 30, 1560) Michelangelo had forwarded his sketch to France, for the Queen criticised some details relating to the portrait of her husband.  She may have remembered with what idealistic freedom the statues of the Dukes of Nemours and Urbino had been treated in the Medicean Sacristy.  Anyhow, she sent a picture, and made her agent, Baccio del Bene, write a postscript to her letter, ordering Michelangelo to model the King’s head without curls, and to adopt the rich modern style for his armour and the trappings of his charger.  She particularly insisted upon the likeness being carefully brought out.

Michelangelo died before the equestrian statue of Henri II. was finished.  Cellini, in his Memoirs, relates that Daniele da Volterra worked slowly, and caused much annoyance to the Queen-mother of France.  In 1562 her agent, Baccio del Bene, came to Florence on financial business with the Duke.  He then proposed that Cellini should return to Paris and undertake the ornamental details of the tomb.  The Duke would not consent, and Catherine de’ Medici did not choose to quarrel with her cousin about an artist.  So this arrangement, which might have secured the completion of the statue on a splendid scale, fell through.  When Daniele died in 1566, only the horse was cast; and this part served finally for Biard’s statue of Louis XIII.

III

The sculptor Leone Leoni, who was employed upon the statue of Giangiacomo de’ Medici in Milan, wrote frequently to Michelangelo, showing by his letters that a warm friendship subsisted between them, which was also shared by Tommaso Cavalieri.  In the year 1560, according to Vasari, Leoni modelled a profile portrait of the great master, which he afterwards cast in medal form.  This is almost the most interesting, and it is probably the most genuine contemporary record which we possess regarding Michelangelo’s appearance in the body.  I may therefore take it as my basis for inquiring into the relative value of the many portraits said to have been modelled, painted, or sketched from the hero in his lifetime.  So far as I am hitherto aware, no claim has been put in for the authenticity of any likeness, except Bonasoni’s engraving, anterior to the date we have arrived at.  While making this statement, I pass over the prostrate old man in the Victory, and the Nicodemus of the Florentine Pieta, both of which, with more or less reason, have been accepted as efforts after self-portraiture.