Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 04 (of 10): Filippino Lippi to Domenico PuligoVasari, Giorgio
History
Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 04 (of 10): Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo
Vasari, Giorgio
Art, Italian; Artists -- Italy -- Biography
Having gone from Siena to Florence in order to see both the works of
those masters who were then living and those of many already dead,
he painted for Lorenzo de' Medici certain nude gods on a canvas, for
which he was much commended, and a picture of Our Lady with two
little prophets in terretta, which is now at Castello, a villa of
Duke Cosimo's. These works, both the one and the other, he presented
to the said Lorenzo, who would never be beaten by any man in
liberality and magnificence. He also painted a round picture of Our
Lady, which is in the Audience Chamber of the Captains of the Guelph
party--a very beautiful work. At Chiusuri in the district of Siena,
the principal seat of the Monks of Monte Oliveto, he painted eleven
scenes of the life and acts of S. Benedict on one side of the
cloister. And from Cortona he sent some of his works to
Montepulciano; to Foiano the panel which is on the high-altar of the
Pieve; and other works to other places in Valdichiana. In the
Madonna, the principal church of Orvieto, he finished with his own
hand the chapel that Fra Giovanni da Fiesole had formerly begun
there; in which chapel he painted all the scenes of the end of the
world with bizarre and fantastic invention--angels, demons, ruins,
earthquakes, fires, miracles of Antichrist, and many other similar
things besides, such as nudes, foreshortenings, and many beautiful
figures; imagining the terror that there shall be on that last and
awful day. By means of this he encouraged all those who have lived
after him, insomuch that since then they have found easy the
difficulties of that manner; wherefore I do not marvel that the
works of Luca were ever very highly extolled by Michelagnolo, nor
that in certain parts of his divine Judgment, which he made in the
chapel, he should have deigned to avail himself in some measure of
the inventions of Luca, as he did in the angels, the demons, the
division of the Heavens, and other things, in which Michelagnolo
himself imitated Luca's method, as all may see. In this work Luca
portrayed himself and many of his friends; Niccolo, Paolo, and
Vitelozzo Vitelli, Giovan Paolo and Orazio Baglioni, and others
whose names are not known. In the Sacristy of S. Maria at Loreto he
painted in fresco the four Evangelists, the four Doctors, and other
saints, all very beautiful; and for this work he was liberally
rewarded by Pope Sixtus.
It is said that a son of his, most beautiful in countenance and in
person, whom he loved dearly, was killed at Cortona; and that Luca,
heart-broken as he was, had him stripped naked, and with the
greatest firmness of soul, without lamenting or shedding a tear,
portrayed him, to the end that, whenever he might wish, he might be
able by means of the work of his own hands to see that which nature
had given him and adverse fortune had snatched away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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