ugh his gallery, and, displaying his
statuary to him, inquired could he do anything that might compare with
it. If the cardinal meant to use the young Florentine cavalierly, his
punishment was immediate and poetic, for amid the antiques Michelangelo
beheld a sleeping Cupid which he instantly claimed as his own work.
Riario was angry; no doubt suspicious, too, of fraud. This Cupid
was--as its appearance showed--a genuine antique, which the cardinal had
purchased from a Milanese dealer for two hundred ducats. Michelangelo,
in a passion, named the dealer--one Baldassare--to whom he had sent
the statue after treating it, with the questionable morality of the
cinquecentist, so as to give it the appearance of having lain in the
ground, to the end that Baldassare might dispose of it as an antique.

His present fury arose from his learning the price paid by the cardinal
to Baldassare, from whom Michelangelo had received only thirty ducats.
In his wrath he demanded--very arbitrarily it seems--the return of his
statue. But to this the cardinal would not consent until Baldassare had
been arrested and made to disgorge the money paid him. Then, at last,
Sforza-Riario complied with Michelangelo's demands and delivered him his
Cupid--a piece of work whose possession had probably ceased to give any
pleasure to that collector of the antique.

But the story was bruited abroad, and cultured Rome was agog to see the
statue which had duped so astute a judge as Sforza-Riario. The fame of
the young sculptor spread like a ripple over water, and it was Cesare
Borgia--at that time still Cardinal of Valencia who bought the Cupid.
Years later he sent it to Isabella d'Este, assuring her that it had not
its equal among contemporary works of art.

CHAPTER V. THE MURDER OF ALFONSO OF ARAGON

We come now to the consideration of an event which, despite the light
that so many, and with such assurance, have shed upon it, remains
wrapped in uncertainty, and presents a mystery second only to that of
the murder of the Duke of Gandia.

It was, you will remember, in July of 1498 that Lucrezia took a second
husband in Alfonso of Aragon, the natural son of Alfonso II of Naples
and nephew of Federigo, the reigning king. He was a handsome boy
of seventeen at the time of his marriage--one year younger than
Lucrezia--and, in honour of the event and in compliance with the Pope's
insistence, he was created by his uncle Duke of Biselli and Prince of
Salern