During the riots which ended in the Medici being again exiled, a large stone fell from the balustrade of the alur of the palace upon an arm of Michelangelo’s statue and broke it into three pieces. For several days the fragments lay on the pavement, until two lads, Giorgio Vasari and Francesco Salviati, picked them up and took them to Salviati’s father, who sixteen years afterwards gave them to the Duke Cosimo I. In a letter from a certain Riccio, of 7th November, 1543, we find that “the people pass their time in watching the building of a scaffolding round the giant David. It is put up for the mending of his poor arm, but many think that his face is to be washed.” In 1875 the statue, which showed signs of deterioration was, after much consideration, removed to the Gallery of the _Belle Arte_, where it now is. Michelangelo was to have made a companion giant for the other side of the door of the Palazzo Vecchio--Hercules slaying Cacus; but Clement VII. was persuaded to give the block of marble to Baccio Bandinelli, with what result we see at the present day. That madcap, egoistical, highly-gifted artist, Benvenuto Cellini, thus described the statue to Duke Cosimo in the presence of Bandinelli, to whom he said: “You must know that it pains me to point out the faults of your statue; I shall not, however, utter my own sentiments, but shall recapitulate what our most virtuous school of Florence says about it.... Well then, this virtuous school says that if one were to shave the hair of your Hercules, there would not be skull enough left to hold his brain; it says that it is impossible to distinguish whether his features are those of a man or of something between a lion and an ox; the face too is turned away from the action of the figure, and is so badly set upon the neck, with such poverty of art and so ill a grace, that nothing worse was ever seen; his sprawling shoulders are like two pommels of an ass’s pack-saddle; his breasts and all the muscles of the body are not portrayed from a man, but from a big sack full of melons set upright against a wall. The lions seem to be modelled from a bag of lanky pumpkins; nobody can tell how his two legs are attached to that vile trunk; it is impossible to say on which leg he stands, or which he uses to exert his strength; nor does he seem to be resting upon both, as sculptors who know something of their art have occasionally set the figure. It is obvious that the body is leaning forward more than one-third of a cubit, which alone is the greatest and most insupportable fault committed by vulgar commonplace pretenders. Concerning the arms, they say that these are both stretched out without one touch of grace or one real spark of artistic talent just as if you had never seen a naked model. Again, the right leg of Hercules and that of Cacus have got one mass of flesh between them, so that if they were to be separated, not only one of them, but both together, would be left without a calf at the point where