Page:Pugilistica - 1906 - Volume 1.djvu/12

 vi Preface to the First Volume. VOLUME II.

PERIOD V. 1820 to 1824. From the Championship of Spring to his retirement from the Ring.

PERIOD VI. 1825 to 1835. From the Championship of Jem Ward to the appearance of Bendigo (William Thompson) of Nottingham.

VOLUME III.

PERIOD VII. 1835 to 1845. From the appearance of Bendigo to his last battle with Caunt.

PERIOD VI II. 1845 to 1857. The interregnum. Bill Perry (the Tipton Slasher), Harry Broome, Tom Paddock, &c.

PERIOD IX. 1856 to 1863. From the appearance of Tom Sayers to the last Championship battle of King and Heenan, December, 1863.

In " the Introduction " I have dealt with the " Classic " pugilism of Greece and Rome. The darkness of the middle ages is as barrea of record of " the art of self- defence" as of other arts. With their revival in Italy we have an amusing coincidence in the "Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini," in which a triumvirate of renowned names are associated with the common-place event of " un grande punzione del naso " a mighty punch on the nose. " Michael-Ansrelo (Buonarotti's) nose was flat from a blow which he received in his youth from Torri-iano,* a brother artist and countryman, who gave me the following account of the occurrence : ' I was,' said Torrigiano, * extremely irritated, and, doubling my fist, gave him such a violent blow on the nose that I felt the cartilages yield as if they had been made of paste, and the mark I then gave him he will carry to the grave.'" Cellini adds : " Torrigiano was a hand- some man, of consummate audacity, having rather the air of a bravo than a sculptor: above all, his strange gestures," [were they boxing attitudes?] "his enormous voice, with a manner of knitting his brows, enough to frighten any man who faced him, gave him a tremendous aspect, and he was continually talking of his great feats among * those bears of Englishmen,' whose country he had lately quitted." Who knows sempre il mal von vien par nocuerelmk we have to thank the now- neglected art, whose precepts and practice inculcated the use of Nature's weapon f that the clenched haud of Torrigiano did not grasp a stiletto ? What then would have been the world's loss ? The majestic cupola of St. Peter's, the wondrous frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, " The La-^t Judgment," the "Sleeping Cupid" of Mantua, the '"Bacchus" of Rome, and all th'i mighty works of the While serving as a volunteer in the army of Pope Alexander VI. he modelled some bronze figures for some Florentine merchants, who invited him to go with them to England. Here he was a favourite with "bluff King Hal," who employed Torrigiano to execute the tomb of his father, Henry VII. in Westminster Abbey, for which he received the then large sum of 1,000. Employed to execute a sarcophagus for Cardinal Wolsey the Ipswich butcher's son his work (once intended to enclose the coffin of Henry VIII. at Windsor) by the " irony of fate " was destined to enshrine the remains of a greater English hero. Nelson lies beneath the dome of St Paul's in the garcophagus sculptured by Torrigiano for Wolsey, his inner coffin being made from a piece of the French flagship L'Oritnt, blown up at the battle of the Nile. Torrigiano died in Spain in the prisons of the Inquisition, having been condemned as a sacrilegious heretic for demolishing a " statue of the Virgin," which having been paid inadequately for by a niggardly nobleman, the Duke of Arcoss, he broke in pieces with his mallet. The incensed grandee had him arrested, and Torrigiano, to aroid being roatted at an auto dafe, refused food and so perished, A.D. 1522.
 * Pietro Torrigiatio's history has an English interest. Ho was certainly a "fighting man."