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
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to appeal to abolitionists and particularly to gain the support of white affluent middle-class women on behalf of female slaves. Her book also addresses the influence of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 on people in the North as well as the South. This act required law enforcement and private citizens in free states to cooperate in the capture and return of fugitive slaves to their masters, increasing penalties for interference. It made it a felony for anybody who found a refugee slave not to return the slave to his or her owner, but abolitionists and activists on the Underground