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This long and close friendship with Luigi comes to a sudden termination in one of those stormy outbursts of petulant rage which form a special feature of Michelangelo's psychology. Some angry words passed between them about an engraving, possibly of the Last Judgment, which Buonarroti wanted to destroy, while Del Riccio refused to obliterate the plate:
He also refounded his own house in the Strada Giulia at Rome, in order to protect himself from the floods that rise when the Tiber is swollen; and he not only began, but in great part completed, the palace that he occupied near S. Biagio, which now belongs to Cardinal Riccio of Montepulciano, who has finished it, adding most ornate apartments, and spending upon it vast sums in addition to what had been spent by Antonio, which was some thousands of crowns.
In reply, Michelangelo sent Strozzi a singular message by Luigi del Riccio, to the effect that "if the king of France restored Florence to liberty, he was ready to make his statue on horseback out of bronze at his own cost, and set it up in the Piazza."
We have a letter of uncertain date, in which Michelangelo tells Del Riccio that he has sent him a madrigal, begging him, if he thinks fit, to commit the verses "to the fire that is, to what consumes me."
Leicester would have been welcome to Knox; Darnley was a Catholic, if anything, and a weak passionate young fool. Mary, in the clash of interests, was a lost woman, as Randolph truly said, with sincere pity. Her long endurance, her attempts to "run the English course," were wasted. David Riccio, who came to Scotland as a musician in 1561, was now high in her and in Darnley's favour.
The Queen had new advisers Riccio, Balfour, Bothwell, the eldest son of the late Huntly, and Lennox, till the wretched Darnley in a few weeks proved his incapacity. Lethington, rather neglected, hung about the Court, as he remained with Mary of Guise long after he had intended to desert her.
Again, just when Knox was writing to Scotland in December 1557, his allies there, he says, made "a common Band," a confederacy and covenant such as the Scots usually drew up before a murder, as of Riccio or Darnley, or for slaying Argyll and "the bonny Earl o' Murray," under James VI. These Bands were illegal.
He even hazarded one of his unfulfilled prophecies: Anabaptists, wicked men, will execute those divine judgments for which Protestants of his species are too tender-hearted; though, somehow, they make exceptions in the cases of Beaton and Riccio, and ought to do so in the case of Mary Stuart! Lethington did not use this passage of our Reformer's works against him, though it was published in 1560.
Now Nanni, who had in those days a passing good reputation for excellence, was executing many works both in joinery and in carving for the villa of Zanobi Bartolini at Rovezzano, without the Porta alla Croce, for the palace of the Bartolini, which Giovanni, the brother of that Zanobi, was having built at that time on the Piazza di S. Trinita, and for the house and garden of the same man in Gualfonda; and Tribolo, who was made to work by Nanni without discretion, always having to handle saws, planes, and other common tools, and not being capable, by reason of the feebleness of his body, of such exertions, began to feel dissatisfied and to say to Riccio, when he asked for the cause of his discontent, that he did not think that he could remain with Nanni in that craft, and that therefore Raffaello should see to placing him with Andrea del Sarto or Jacopo Sansovino, whom he had come to know in Unghero's workshop, for the reason that with one or the other of them he hoped to do better and to be sounder in health.
He met his fate without a murmur, save at the last when he stood upon the scaffold and, gazing toward the palace, cried in French: "Oh, cruel queen! I die for you!" Another favorite, the Italian, David Rizzio, or Riccio, in like manner wrote love verses to the queen, and she replied to them in kind; but there is no evidence that she valued him save for his ability, which was very great.
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