Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 01 (of 10): Cimabue to Agnolo GaddiVasari, Giorgio
History
Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 01 (of 10): Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi
Vasari, Giorgio
Art, Italian; Artists -- Italy -- Biography
there should serve the impost paid by the district (thus do they call a
tax), as a particular revenue for that work; which impost has lasted up
to our own day, and continues to last.
Now returning to Margaritone: from what is seen in his works, as regards
painting, he was the first who considered what a man must do when he
works on panels of wood, to the end that they may stay firm in the
joinings, and that they may not show fissures and cracks opening out
after they have been painted; for he was used to put over the whole
surface of the panels a canvas of linen cloth, attached with a strong
glue made from shreds of parchment and boiled over a fire; and then
over the said canvas he spread gesso, as is seen in many panels by him
and by others. He wrought, besides, on gesso mingled with the same glue,
friezes and diadems in relief and other ornaments in the round; and he
was the inventor of the method of applying Armenian bole, and of
spreading gold-leaf thereon and burnishing it. All these things, never
seen before, are seen in many of his works, and in particular in the
Pieve of Arezzo, in an altar-front wherein are stories of S. Donatus,
and in S. Agnesa and S. Niccolo in the same city.
Finally, he wrought many works in his own country, which went abroad;
some of which are at Rome, in S. Giovanni and in S. Pietro, and some at
Pisa, in S. Caterina, where, in the tramezzo[10] of the church, there is
set up over an altar a panel with S. Catherine on it, and many scenes
from her life with little figures, and a S. Francis with many scenes on
a panel, on a ground of gold. And in the upper Church of S. Francesco
d'Assisi there is a Crucifix by his hand, painted in the Greek manner,
on a beam that crosses the church. All which works were in great esteem
among the people of that age, although to-day by us they are not
esteemed save as old things, good when art was not, as it is to-day, at
its height. And seeing that Margaritone applied himself also to
architecture, although I have not made mention of any buildings made
with his design, because they are not of importance, I will yet not
forbear to say that he, according to what I find, made the design and
model of the Palazzo de' Governatori in the city of Ancona, after the
Greek manner, in the year 1270; and what is more, he made in sculpture,
on the principal front, eight windows, whereof each one has, in the
space in the middle, two columns that support in the middle two arches,
over which each window has a scene in half-relief that reaches from the
said small arches up to the top of the window; a scene, I say, from the
Old Testament, carved in a kind of stone that is found in that district.
Under the said windows, on the facade, there are certain words that are
understood rather at discretion than because they are either in good
form or rightly written, wherein there is read the date and in whose
time this work was made. By the hand of the same man, also, was the
design of the Church of S.
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