Equally intimate with the Medici, if not more so, was Antonio del Pollaiuolo, whose family connections linked him to the school of Ghiberti. In his sculptures the goldsmith is more closely discernible than in those of Verrocchio. They both, while painting and sculpturing, continued to work as goldsmiths, and Pollaiuolo was regarded in his native city as the first master of this branch. ‘A man unique in his art,’ wrote the Signoria, after his death, to the ambassador in Rome, ‘well deserving that we, who are wont to value praiseworthy qualities of whatever nature, should honour his memory by supporting his heirs.’[192] Lorenzo’s high esteem for him is shown by passages in his letters to Giovanni Lanfredini. The silver helmet presented in 1472 to the conqueror of Volterra was by Pollaiuolo; so was also the oft-copied medal representing the criminal attempt of the Pazzi, more valuable in a historical than in an artistic point of view. No great works of sculpture by him are known in Florence, the labour of his latter years being chiefly devoted to Rome, where his masterpiece is the tomb of Pope Sixtus IV. in the chapel of the Holy Sacrament in St. Peter’s, and where he died in 1498.[193] As Verocchio and Pollaiuolo passed from goldsmith’s work to sculpture, without abandoning altogether their original occupation, so Benedetto da Majano rose from artistic cabinet-work to sculpture and architecture. The monument to Giotto in Sta. Maria del Fiore—a marble bust in a richly ornamented circular frame—was, according to the inscription, erected by the citizens in 1490.[194] The bust of Antonio Squarcialupi, in the same church, is only ascribed to Benedetto by a later tradition, which the merit of the work by no means justifies.[195] The erection of both monuments was, doubtless, due to Lorenzo. Benedetto’s greatest work was a pulpit, executed for a Florentine citizen—Pietro Mellini—of whom he also made, in 1474, a most natural and expressive marble bust, which he signed with his name. The pulpit is decorated with reliefs, representing scenes in the history of St. Francis of Assisi—the richest and finest work of the kind since that of the Pisani. In imitation of Ghiberti, the reliefs are freely handled; landscapes and backgrounds in perspective are introduced, but with a careful subordination of the pictorial elements which afterwards became too prominent.[196] In Sta. Maria Novella is Benedetto’s monument to Filippo Strozzi. The artist who built the palace, of which the owner lived to see only the beginning, also erected in his beautiful family chapel this mausoleum, which was begun before his death.[197] Above the black marble sarcophagus, in the middle of a panel under an arch delicately carved in arabesques, is a large medallion of the Virgin and Child, in white marble, surrounded by a rich garland of flowers and foliage; at the sides are four angels in adoration. The charm of expression and delicacy of treatment recall