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If the bronze relief of the "Crucifixion" in the Bargello be really Pollajuolo's, we may even trace a leaning to Verocchio in his manner. The emphatic passion of the women recalls the group of mourners round the death-bed of Selvaggia Tornabuoni in Verocchio's celebrated bas-relief.
We who think the ring, the cockpit, and the bullfight barbarous, should study Pollajuolo's engraving in order to imagine the horrors of a duel 'a steccato chiuso. Of the inclination of Sixtus to sensuality, Infessura writes: 'Hic, ut fertur vulgo, et experientia demonstravit, puerorum amator et sodomita fuit. After mentioning the Riarii and a barber's son, aged twelve, he goes on: 'taceo nunc alia, quæ circa hoc possent recitari, quia visa sunt de continuo. It was not, perhaps, a wholly Protestant calumny which accused Sixtus of granting private indulgences for the commission of abominable crimes in certain seasons of the year.
The mystic sympathies of "Leda and the Swan," as imaged severally by Lionardo and Michael Angelo; Correggio's romantic handling of the myths of "Danaë" and "Io;" Titian's and Tintoretto's rival pictures of "Bacchus and Ariadne;" Raphael's "Galatea;" Pollajuolo's "Hercules;" the "Europa" of Veronese; the "Circe" of Dosso Dossi; Palma's "Venus;" Sodoma's "Marriage of Alexander" all these, to mention none but pictures familiar to every traveller in Italy, raise for the student of the classical Revival absorbing questions relative to the influences of pagan myths upon the modern imagination.