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Medio sustulit digito: There is more than a suggestion in the choice of the middle finger, in this instance. Among the Romans, the middle finger was known as the "infamous finger." Infami digito et lustralibus ante salivis Expiat, urentes oculos inhibere perita. Persius, Sat. ii See also Dio Chrysostom, xxxiii.
Wherefore Francia, half dead with terror at the beauty of the picture, which lay before his eyes challenging comparison with those by his own hand that he saw around him, felt all confounded, and had it placed with great diligence in that chapel of S. Giovanni in Monte for which it was destined; and taking to his bed in a few days almost beside himself, thinking that he was now almost of no account in his art in comparison with the opinion held both by himself and by others, he died of grief and melancholy, so some believe, overtaken by the same fate, through contemplating too attentively that most lifelike picture of Raffaello's, as befell Fivizzano from feasting his eyes with his own beautiful Death, about which the following epigram was written: Me veram pictor divinus mente recepit; Admota est operi deinde perita manus.
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