Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 07 (of 10): Tribolo to Il SodomaVasari, Giorgio
History
Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 07 (of 10): Tribolo to Il Sodoma
Vasari, Giorgio
Art, Italian; Artists -- Italy -- Biography
While these works were being executed by Tribolo in Florence, M.
Bartolommeo Barbazzi, a Bolognese gentleman who had gone there on some
business, remembered that a search was being made in Bologna for a
young man who could work well, to the end that he might be set to
making figures and scenes of marble for the facade of S. Petronio, the
principal church of that city. Wherefore he spoke to Tribolo, and
having seen some of his works, which pleased him, as also did the
young man's ways and other qualities, he took him to Bologna, where
Tribolo, with great diligence and with much credit to himself, in a
short time made the two Sibyls of marble that were afterwards placed
in the ornament of that door of S. Petronio which leads to the Della
Morte Hospital. These works finished, arrangements were being made to
give him greater things to do, and he was receiving many proofs of
love and affection from M. Bartolommeo, when the plague of the year
1525 began in Bologna and throughout all Lombardy; whereupon Tribolo,
in order to avoid that plague, made his way to Florence. After living
there during all the time that this contagious and pestilential
sickness lasted, he departed as soon as it had ceased, and returned,
in obedience to a summons, to Bologna, where M. Bartolommeo, not
allowing him to set his hand to any work for the facade, resolved,
seeing that many of his friends and relatives had died, to have a tomb
made for himself and for them. And so Tribolo, after finishing the
model, which M. Bartolommeo insisted on seeing completed before he did
anything else, went in person to Carrara to have the marbles
excavated, intending to rough-hew them on the spot and to lighten them
in such a manner, that they might not only be easier to transport, as
indeed they were, but also that the figures might come out larger. In
that place, in order not to waste his time, he blocked out two large
children of marble, which were taken to Bologna with beasts of burden,
unfinished as they were, together with the rest of the work; and after
the death of M. Bartolommeo, which caused such grief to Tribolo that
he returned to Tuscany, they were placed, with the other marbles, in
a chapel in S. Petronio, where they still are.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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