His Chancellor, who was afterwards the Cardinal of Bibbiena, cried out: 'You are a madman! Which do you think Lorenzo loved best, his son or you?
If his son, would he not rather have appeared to him than to some one else ?' Having thus jeered him, they let him go; and he, when he returned home and complained to Michelangelo, so convinced the latter of the truth of his vision that Michelangelo after two days left Florence with a couple of comrades, dreading that if what Cardiere had predicted should come true, he would no longer be safe in Florence." This ghost-story bears a remarkable resemblance to what Clarendon relates concerning the apparition of Sir George Villiers.

Wishing to warn his son, the Duke of Buckingham, of his coming murder at the hand of Lieutenant Felton, he did not appear to the Duke himself, but to an old man-servant of the family; upon which behaviour of Sir George's ghost the same criticism has been passed as on that of Lorenzo de' Medici.
Michelangelo and his two friends travelled across the Apennines to Bologna, and thence to Venice, where they stopped a few days.

Want of money, or perhaps of work there drove them back upon the road to Florence.

When they reached Bologna on the return journey, a curious accident happened to the party.

The master of the city, Giovanni Bentivoglio, had recently decreed that every foreigner, on entering the gates, should be marked with a seal of red wax upon his thumb.