When Buonarroti penned that sonnet in which he called the Pope his Medusa, he might well have been thinking of Leo, though the poem ought probably to be referred to the earlier pontificate of Julius.

Certainly the Medici did more than the Delia Rovere to paralyse his power and turn the life within him into stone.
Writing to Sebastiano del Piombo in 1521, Michelangelo shows how fully he was aware of this.

He speaks of "the three years I have lost." A meeting had been arranged for the late autumn of 1515 between Leo X.
and Francis I.at Bologna.

The Pope left Rome early in November, and reached Florence on the 30th.

The whole city burst into a tumult of jubilation, shouting the Medicean cry of _"Palle"_ as Leo passed slowly through the streets, raised in his pontifical chair upon the shoulders of his running footmen.