on the Via Appia.[11] For the Company of the Crocifisso, attached to the Church of S. Marcello, he made a Crucifix for carrying in procession, a thing full of grace; and for Cardinal Antonio di Monte he began a great fabric at his villa without Rome, on the Acqua Vergine. And by the hand of Jacopo, perhaps, is a very beautiful portrait in marble of that elder Cardinal di Monte which is now in the Palace of Signor Fabiano at Monte Sansovino, over the door of the principal chamber off the hall. He directed, also, the building of the house of Messer Luigi Leoni, a most commodious edifice, and in the Banchi a palace beside the house of the Gaddi, which was bought afterwards by Filippo Strozzi--certainly a commodious and most beautiful fabric, with many ornaments. [Footnote 11: Via Flaminia.] At this time, with the favour of Pope Leo, the Florentine colony had bestirred itself out of emulation of the Germans, Spaniards, and Frenchmen, who had either begun or finished the churches of their colonies in Rome, and had begun to perform their solemn offices in those already built and adorned; and the Florentines had sought leave likewise to build a church for themselves. For which the Pope having given instructions to Lodovico Capponi, the Consul of the Florentine colony at that time, it was determined that behind the Banchi, at the beginning of the Strada Giulia, on the bank of the Tiber, an immense church should be built, to be dedicated to S. John the Baptist; which might surpass in magnificence, grandeur, cost, ornamentation, and design, the churches of all the other colonies. There competed, then, in making designs for this work, Raffaello da Urbino, Antonio da San Gallo, Baldassarre da Siena, and Sansovino; and the Pope, when he had seen all their designs, extolled as the best that of Sansovino, because, besides other things, he had made at each of the four corners of that church a tribune, and a larger tribune in the centre, after the likeness of the plan that Sebastiano Serlio placed in his second book on Architecture. Whereupon, all the heads of the Florentine colony concurring with the will of the Pope, with much approval of Sansovino, the foundations were begun for a part of that church, altogether twenty-two canne[12] in length. But, there being not enough space, and yet wishing to make the façade of the church in line with the houses of the Strada Giulia, they were obliged to stretch out into the stream of the Tiber at least fifteen canne; which pleasing many of them, because the grandeur as well as the cost was increased by making the foundations in the river, work was begun on this, and they spent upon it more than forty thousand crowns, which would have been enough to build half the masonry of the church. [Footnote 12: A "canna" is equal to about four braccia.]