little places of retirement, and thus deprived the Palace of a very rare work; which that holy man would not have done if he had possessed any taste for the arts of design. Giovanni painted the cartoons for those hangings and chamber-tapestries that were afterwards woven in silk and gold in Flanders, in which are certain little boys that are sporting around various festoons, and as ornaments the devices of Pope Leo and various animals copied from life. These tapestries, which are very rare works, are still in the Palace at the present day. He also executed the cartoons for some tapestries full of grotesques, which are in the first rooms of the Consistory. [Illustration: ARABESQUES (_After the fresco by =Giovanni da Udine=. Rome: The Vatican, Loggia_) _Anderson_] While Giovanni was labouring at those works, the Palace of M. Giovan Battista dall'Aquila, which had been erected at the head of the Borgo Nuovo, near the Piazza di S. Pietro, had the greater part of the facade decorated in stucco by the hand of the same master, which was held to be a remarkable work. The same Giovanni executed the paintings and all the stucco-work in the loggia of the villa that Cardinal Giulio de' Medici caused to be built under Monte Mario, wherein are animals, grotesques, festoons, and friezes of such beauty, that it appears as if in that work Giovanni had sought to outstrip and surpass his own self. Wherefore he won from that Cardinal, who much loved his genius, in addition to many benefits that he received for his relatives, the gift of a canonicate for himself at Civitale in Friuli, which was afterwards given by Giovanni to a brother of his own. Then, having to make for the same Cardinal, likewise at that villa, a fountain with the water spouting through the trunk of an elephant's head in marble, he imitated in the whole work and in every detail the Temple of Neptune, which had been discovered a short time before among the ancient ruins of the Palazzo Maggiore, all adorned with lifelike products of the sea, and wrought excellently well with various ornaments in stucco; and he even surpassed by a great measure the artistry of that ancient hall by giving great beauty to those animals, shells, and other suchlike things without number, and arranging them very well. After this he made another fountain, but in a rustic manner, in the hollow of a torrent-bed surrounded by a wood; causing water to flow in drops and fine jets from sponge-stones and stalactites, with beautiful artifice, so that it had all the appearance of a work of nature. On the highest point of those hollow rocks and sponge-stones he fashioned a large lion's head, which had around it a garland formed of maidenhair and other plants, trained there with great artistry; and no one could believe what grace these gave to that wild place, which was most beautiful in every part and beyond all conception pleasing.