loving an intimate and friend, not to say a superior, to me, that, if my hand shall accomplish the desire that I have to leave to him a proof by that hand of the affection that I bear him, it will be recognized how much I honour him and how dearly I wish that the memory of a lord so honoured and so loyal, and beloved by me, shall live among posterity, seeing that he exerts himself willingly in favouring all the beautiful intellects that labour in our profession or take delight in design. For the Lord Prince, Don Francesco, I have executed recently two pictures that he has sent to Toledo in Spain, to a sister of the Lady Duchess Leonora, his mother; and for himself a little picture in the manner of a miniature, with forty figures, what with great and small, according to a very beautiful invention of his own. For Filippo Salviati I finished not long since an altar-picture that is going to the Sisters of S. Vincenzio at Prato, wherein on high is Our Lady arrived in Heaven and crowned, and at the foot the Apostles around the Sepulchre. For the Black Friars of the Badia of Florence, likewise, I am painting an altar-piece of the Assumption of Our Lady, which is near completion, with the Apostles in figures larger than life, and other figures at the sides, and around it stories and ornaments accommodated in a novel manner. And since the Lord Duke, so truly excellent in everything, takes pleasure not only in the building of palaces, cities, fortresses, harbours, loggie, public squares, gardens, fountains, villas, and other suchlike things, beautiful, magnificent, and most useful, for the benefit of his people, but also particularly in building anew and reducing to better form and greater beauty, as a truly Catholic Prince, the temples and sacred churches of God, in imitation of the great King Solomon, recently he has caused me to remove the tramezzo[5] of the Church of S. Maria Novella, which had robbed it of all its beauty, and a new and very rich choir was made behind the high-altar, in order to remove that occupying a great part of the centre of that church; which makes it appear a new church and most beautiful, as indeed it is. And because things that have not order and proportion among themselves can never be entirely beautiful, he has ordained that there shall be made in the side-aisles, between column and column, in such a manner as to correspond to the centres of the arches, rich ornaments of stone in a novel form, which are to serve as chapels with altars in the centre, and are all to be in one of two manners; and that then in the altar-pictures that are to go within these ornaments, seven braccia in height and five in breadth, there shall be executed paintings after the will and pleasure of the patrons of the chapels. Within one of those ornaments of stone, made from my design, I have executed for the very reverend Monsignor Alessandro Strozzi, Bishop of Volterra, my old and most loving patron, a Christ Crucified according to the Vision of S.