Among the Modenese, also, there have been at all times craftsmen excellent in our arts, as has been said in other places, and as may be seen from four panel-pictures, of which no mention was made in the proper place because the master was not known; which pictures were executed in distemper a hundred years ago in that city, and, for those times, they are painted with diligence and very beautiful. The first is on the high-altar of S. Domenico, and the others in the chapels that are in the tramezzo[1] of that church. And there is living in the same country at the present day a painter called Niccolo, who in his youth painted many works in fresco about the Beccherie, which have no little beauty, and for the high-altar of S. Piero, a seat of the Black Friars, in an altar-piece, the Beheading of S. Peter and S. Paul, imitating in the soldier who is cutting off their heads a similar figure by the hand of Antonio da Correggio, much renowned, which is in S. Giovanni Evangelista at Parma. Niccolo has been more excellent in fresco-painting than in the other fields of painting, and, in addition to many works that he has executed at Modena and Bologna, I understand that he has painted some very choice pictures in France, where he still lives, under Messer Francesco Primaticcio, Abbot of S. Martin, after whose designs Niccolo has painted many works in those parts, as will be related in the Life of Primaticcio. [Footnote 1: See note on p. 57, Vol. I.] Giovan Battista, also, a rival of that Niccolo, has executed many works in Rome and elsewhere, and in particular he has painted at Perugia, in the Chapel of Signor Ascanio della Cornia, in S. Francesco, many pictures of the life of S. Andrew the Apostle, in which he has acquitted himself very well. In competition with the above-named Niccolo, the Fleming Arrigo, a master of glass windows, has painted in the same place an altar-piece in oils, containing the story of the Magi, which would be beautiful enough if it were not somewhat confused and overloaded with colours, which conflict with one another and destroy all the gradation; but he has acquitted himself better in a window of glass designed and painted by himself, and executed for the Chapel of S. Bernardino in S. Lorenzo, in the same city. But to return to Giovan Battista; having gone back after the above-named works to Modena, he has executed in the same S. Piero, for which Niccolo painted the altar-piece, two great scenes at the sides, of the actions of S. Peter and S. Paul, in which he has acquitted himself with no ordinary excellence.