[Illustration: LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT AND THE AMBASSADORS (_After the fresco by =Giorgio Vasari=. Florence: Palazzo Vecchio_) _Brogi_] While the work for those ceilings was being prepared, having obtained leave from the Duke, I went to spend two months between Arezzo and Cortona, partly to give completion to some affairs of my own, and partly to finish a work in fresco begun on the walls and vaulting of the Company of Jesus at Cortona. In that place I painted three stories of the life of Jesus Christ, and all the sacrifices offered to God in the Old Testament, from Cain and Abel down to the Prophet Nehemiah; and there, during that time, I also furnished designs and models for the fabric of the Madonna Nuova, without the city. The work for the Company of Jesus being finished, I returned to Florence in the year 1555 with all my family, to serve Duke Cosimo. And there I began and finished the compartments, walls, and ceiling of the above-named upper Hall, called the Sala degli Elementi, painting in the compartments, which are eleven, the Castration of Heaven in the air. In a terrace beside that Hall I painted on the ceiling the actions of Saturn and Ops, and then on the ceiling of another great chamber all the story of Ceres and Proserpine; and in a still larger chamber, which is beside the last, likewise on the ceiling, which is very rich, stories of the Goddess Berecynthia and of Cybele with her Triumph, and the four Seasons, and on the walls all the twelve Months. On the ceiling of another, not so rich, I painted the Birth of Jove and the Goat Amaltheia nursing him, with the rest of the other most notable things related of him; in another terrace beside the same room, much adorned with stones and stucco-work, other things of Jove and Juno; and finally, in the next chamber, the Birth of Hercules and all his Labours. All that could not be included on the ceilings was placed in the friezes of each room, or has been placed in the arras-tapestries that the Lord Duke has caused to be woven for each room from my cartoons, corresponding to the pictures high up on the walls. I shall not speak of the grotesques, ornaments, and pictures of the stairs, nor of many other smaller details executed by my hand in that apartment of rooms, because, besides that I hope that a longer account may be given of them on another occasion, everyone may see them at his pleasure and judge of them.