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
12 Years a Slave (film) slave era in America" with "a character that was not obvious in terms of their trade in slavery." Developing the idea back and forth, the two did not strike a chord until McQueen's partner, Bianca Stigter, found Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir "Twelve Years a Slave". McQueen later told an interviewer: After a lengthy development process, during which Brad Pitt's production company Plan B Entertainment backed the project, which eventually helped get some financing from various film studios, the film was officially announced in August 2011 with McQueen to direct and Chiwetel Ejiofor to star as Solomon Northup, a free African-American