Androcles Classical accounts. Agostino Veneziano depicts the slave Androcles being freed by the Emperor in a work from 1516-17 now in the LACMA collection. There is also an early pen and wash drawing by Baldassare Peruzzi dating from the 1530s in the Hermitage Museum. Dependent on the account by Aulus Gellius, it depicts Androcles walking through a doorway with the lion on a lead at his heel. Other artists have preferred the scene of Androcles pulling the thorn from the lion's paw, as in Bernhard Rode's print of 1784. A later American example is Walter Inglis Anderson's block print scroll of
Portrait of a Gentleman with a Lion Paw gentleman wearing a rich, fur-lined black coat. He stands in front of a rich red and a green textile background and shows us a gilt lion's paw. His right hand, in a gesture typical of Lotto, touches his heart, showing two valuable rings. The composition and the colors show the influence of Titian, then the most respected painter in Venice. The symbolic meaning of the lion's paw is not clear. It could be an allusion to the subject's name, perhaps Leonino Brambati of Bergamo, or a member of the Venetian Zatta family (zatta, in Venetian dialect, means "paw"). It has