who loved the arts, took compassion on him and went to his house. When no one answered his knock he entered by a secret way, and passing from room to room found Michael Angelo in desperate case. Baccio refused to leave him before he was healed.”[1]
As Julius II. had formerly done, Paul III. used to come to see Michael Angelo painting, and gave his opinion. He was accompanied by his master of the ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena. One day the Pope asked this official what he thought of the work. Biagio, who, says Vasari, was a very scrupulous person, declared that it was “a disgrace to have put so many nudes in such a place, and that the painting was better suited to a bathing-place or an inn than a chapel. This angered Michael Angelo, so, after they had gone, he drew a portrait of Biagio from memory, representing him as Minos in Hell among a troop of devils, with a great serpent wound about his legs.” Biagio complained to the Pope. But Paul III. laughed at him. “Had Michael Angelo put you in Purgatory,” he said to him, “there might have been some remedy, but from Hell, ‘Nulla est redemption.’”
Biagio was not the only one to find Michael Angelo’s paintings indecent. Italy was becoming prudish, and the time was not far distant when Veronese was to be summoned before the Inquisition for the impropriety of his “Supper at the House of Simon.”[2] Plenty of people could be found to cry out scandal before “The
