For the furtherance of such studies this good friend of ours sent him the corpse of a Moor, a young man of incomparable beauty, and admirably adapted for our purpose.

It was placed at S.Agata, where I dwelt and still dwell, as being a quarter removed from public observation.
"On this corpse Michelangelo demonstrated to me many rare and abstruse things, which perhaps have never yet been fully understood, and all of which I noted down, hoping one day, by the help of some learned man, to give them to the public.

Of Michelangelo's studies in anatomy we have one grim but interesting record in a pen-drawing by his hand at Oxford.

A corpse is stretched upon a plank and trestles.

Two men are bending over it with knives in their hands; and, for light to guide them in their labours, a candle is stuck into the belly of the subject." As it is not my intention to write the political history of Michelangelo's period, I need not digress here upon the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII., which caused the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, and the establishment of a liberal government under the leadership of Savonarola.