On Sunday, 12 march 1564, the coffin containing the body of Michelangelo, recently spirited out of Rome, was surreptitiously placed in the vault of the Florentine church of San Piero Maggiore, behind the altar that served as a meeting place for the Confraternity of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. After dark, a small group of Michelangelo's most devoted followers once again carried the coffin through the streets of Florence. Although this small group of followers made every attempt to keep the preliminary funeral rites a secret, a crowd materialized around the pallbearers and torchbearers carrying the coffin to its destination, the Franciscan basilica of Santa Croce. By the time the coffin had been placed inside and the monks had blessed the body, such a crowd had suddenly found its way to the basilica that only with difficulty did the official mourners bring the coffin to the sacristy. There, as the crowd pressed around Don Vincenzio Borghini, forty-nine years old, the prior of the foundling hospital of the Innocenti, he tentatively opened up Michelangelo's coffin. In Vasari's account:

So it was that Giorgio Vasari and Vincenzio Borghini together, in formal language reminiscent of the translation of saints’ relics, constructed the “divine Michelangelo.”