Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 08 (of 10): Bastiano to Taddeo ZuccheroVasari, Giorgio
History
Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 08 (of 10): Bastiano to Taddeo Zucchero
Vasari, Giorgio
Art, Italian; Artists -- Italy -- Biography
Finally, then, having returned to Florence in the year 1561, he went off
with Maestro Zaccheria to Pisa, where the Lord Duke and the Cardinal
were, to do reverence to their most illustrious lordships; and after he
had been received with much kindness and favour by those lords, and
informed by the Duke that after his return to Florence he would be given
a work of importance to execute, he went back. Then, having obtained
leave from his fellow-friars of the Nunziata by means of Maestro
Zaccheria, he erected in the centre of the chapter-house of that
convent, where many years before he had made the Moses and S. Paul of
stucco, as has been related above, a very beautiful tomb for himself and
for all such men of the arts of design, painters, sculptors, and
architects, as had not a place of their own in which to be buried;
intending to arrange by a contract, as he did, that those friars, in
return for the property that he was to leave to them, should be obliged
to say Mass on some feast-days and ordinary days in that chapter-house,
and that every year, on the day of the most Holy Trinity, a solemn
festival should be held there, and on the following day an office of the
dead for the souls of those buried in that place.
This design having then been imparted by Fra Giovanni Agnolo and Maestro
Zaccheria to Giorgio Vasari, who was very much their friend, they
discoursed together on the affairs of the Company of Design, which had
been created in the time of Giotto, and had a home in S. Maria Nuova in
Florence, which it had possessed from that time down to our own, as may
still be seen at the present day from a record at the high-altar of that
Hospital; and they thought with this occasion to revive it and set it up
again. For that Company had been removed from the above-mentioned
high-altar, as has been related in the Life of Jacopo di Casentino, to a
place under the vaulting of the same Hospital at the corner of the Via
della Pergola, and finally had been removed and driven from that place
also by Don Isidoro Montaguti, the Director of the Hospital, so that it
was almost entirely dispersed, and no longer assembled. Now, after Fra
Giovanni Agnolo, Maestro Zaccheria, and Giorgio had thus discoursed at
some length of the condition of that Company, and the Frate had spoken
of it with Bronzino, Francesco da San Gallo, Ammanati, Vincenzio de'
Rossi, Michele di Ridolfo, and many other sculptors and painters of the
first rank, and had declared his mind to them, when the morning of the
most Holy Trinity came, all the most noble and excellent craftsmen of
the arts of design, to the number of forty-eight, were assembled in the
above-named chapter-house, where a most beautiful festival had been
prepared, and where the tomb was already finished, and the altar so far
advanced that there were wanting only some figures of marble that were
going into it. There, after a most solemn Mass had been said, a
beautiful oration was made by one of those fathers in praise of Fra
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