Antonio Toto, who, as already noted, was brought over to England by Torrigiano, was an artist of greater capabilities than Volpe and Carmillian. He spent nearly forty years in England, and throughout the whole of the time appears to have been in the royal service. He usually worked in conjunction with another Italian painter, Bartolommeo Penni, their names almost always appearing together in the Household Accounts. Toto was the son of one Toto dell’ Nunziata, a painter of Florence of some standing, a maker of “puppets,” and a great practical joker, as Vasari relates. The son was a fellow-pupil with Perino del Vaga in Ridolfo Ghirlandajo’s studio. Toto took part with his master in painting a Madonna and Child in the church of San Pietro Scheraggio, a building no longer in existence. Vasari says that he was taken to England by some Florentine merchants, and there executed all his works, “and by the King of that province, for whom he wrought in architecture (as well as in sculpture and painting), and for whom he built his principal palace, was most handsomely rewarded.” The “principal palace” referred to by Vasari was evidently Nonsuch, near Cheam, in Surrey, which was begun in 1538 by Henry VIII, who acquired the site, previously called Cuddington, in that year. The original and principal structure was of two storeys, the lower being of substantial and well-wrought freestone, and the upper of wood, “richly adorned and set forth, and garnished with a variety of statues, pictures (_i.e._ coloured figures in relief), and other artistic forms of excellent art and workmanship, and of no small cost”—it is thus described in the survey of the Parliamentary Commissioners in 1650.[601] This singular building remained in good condition for more than a century, and was described by both Evelyn and Pepys in 1665. The former says that the plaster statues and basso-relievos “must needs have been the work of some celebrated Italian.” Pepys speaks of the same features as “figures of stories and good painting of Rubens or Holbein’s doing.” In the earliest account of it, published in Braun’s _Urbium Præcipuarum Mundi Theatrum Quintium_, in 1583, it is stated that Henry VIII “procured many excellent artificers, architects, sculptors, and statuaries, as well Italians, French, and Dutch as natives, who all applied to the ornament of this mansion the finest and most curious skill they possessed in their several arts, embellishing it within and without with magnificent statues, some of which vividly represent the antiquities of Rome and some surpass them.” A view of the palace by Joris Hoefnagel accompanied this account, which gives an excellent idea of the building before the additions were made to it by Lord Lumley.