This was the time of the great excavations about Rome; treasures of ancient art were daily being rescued from the soil, and Cardinal Sforza-Riario was a great dilletante and collector of the antique.

With pride of possession, he conducted the young sculptor through 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.