LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT AND THE AMBASSADORS
(After the fresco by Giorgio Vasari. Florence: Palazzo Vecchio)
Brogi
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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.

While these upper rooms were being painted, there were built the others that are on the level of the Great Hall, and are connected in a perpendicular line with the first-named, with a very convenient system of staircases public and private that lead from the highest to the lowest quarters of the Palace. Meanwhile Tasso died, and the Duke, who had a very great desire that the Palace, which had been built at haphazard, in various stages and at various times, and more for the convenience of the officials than with any good order, should be put to rights, resolved that he would at all costs have it reconstructed in so far as that was possible, and that in time the Great Hall should be painted, and that Bandinelli should continue the Audience-chamber already begun. In order, therefore, to bring the whole Palace into accord, harmonizing the work already done with that which was to be done, he ordained that I should make several plans and designs, and finally a wooden model after some that had pleased him, the better to be able to proceed to accommodate all the apartments according to his pleasure, and to change and put straight the old stairs, which appeared to him too steep, ill-conceived, and badly made. To which work I set my hand, although it seemed to me a difficult enterprise and beyond my powers, and I executed as best I could a very large model, which is now in the possession of his Excellency; more to obey him than with any hope that I might succeed. That model, when it was finished, pleased him much, whether by his good fortune or mine, or because of the great desire that I had to give satisfaction; whereupon I set my hand to building, and little by little, doing now one thing and now another, the work has been carried to the condition wherein it may now be seen. And while the rest was being done, I decorated with very rich stucco-work in a varied pattern of compartments the first eight of the new rooms that are on a level with the Great Hall, what with saloons, chambers, and a chapel, with various pictures and innumerable portraits from life that come in the scenes, beginning with the elder Cosimo, and calling each room by the name of some great and famous person descended from him. In one, then, are the most notable actions of that Cosimo and those virtues that were most peculiar to him, with his greatest friends and servants and portraits of his children, all from life; and so, also, that of the elder Lorenzo, that of his son, Pope Leo, that of Pope Clement, that of Signor Giovanni, the father of our great Duke, and that of the Lord Duke Cosimo himself. In the chapel is a large and very beautiful picture by the hand of Raffaello da Urbino, between a S. Cosimo and a S. Damiano painted by my hand, to whom that chapel is dedicated. Then in like manner in the upper rooms painted for the Lady Duchess Leonora, which are four, are actions of illustrious women, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Tuscan, one to each chamber. But of these, besides that I have spoken of them elsewhere, there will be a full account in the Dialogue which I am about to give to the world, as I have said; for to describe everything here would have taken too long.

For all these my labours, continuous, difficult, and great as they were, I was rewarded largely and richly by the magnanimous liberality of the great Duke, in addition to my salaries, with donations and with commodious and honourable houses both in Florence and in the country, to the end that I might be able the more advantageously to serve him. Besides which, he has honoured me with the supreme magistracy of Gonfalonier and other offices in my native city of Arezzo, with the right to substitute in them one of the citizens of that place, not to mention that to my brother Ser Piero he has given offices of profit in Florence, and likewise extraordinary favours to my relatives in Arezzo; so that I shall never be weary of confessing the obligation that I feel towards that Lord for so many marks of affection.

Returning to my works, I must go on to say that my most excellent Lord resolved to carry into execution a project that he had had for a long time, of painting the Great Hall, a conception worthy of his lofty and profound spirit; I know not whether, as he said, I believe jesting with me, because he thought for certain that I would get it off his hands, so that he would see it finished in his lifetime, or it may have been from some other private and, as has always been true of him, most prudent judgment. The result, in short, was that he commissioned me to raise the crossbeams and the whole roof thirteen braccia above the height at that time, to make the ceiling of wood, and to overlay it with gold and paint it full of scenes in oils; a vast and most important undertaking, and, if not too much for my courage, perhaps too much for my powers. However, whether it was that the confidence of that great Lord and the good fortune that he has in his every enterprise raised me beyond what I am in myself, or that the hopes and opportunities of so fine a subject furnished me with much greater faculties, or that the grace of God—and this I was bound to place before any other thing—supplied me with strength, I undertook it, and, as has been seen, executed it in contradiction to the opinion of many persons, and not only in much less time than I had promised and the work might be considered to require, but in less than even I or his most illustrious Excellency ever thought. And I can well believe that he was astonished and well satisfied, because it came to be executed at the greatest emergency and the finest occasion that could have occurred; and this was (that the cause of so much haste may be known) that a settlement had been concluded about the marriage which was being arranged between our most illustrious Prince and the daughter of the late Emperor and sister of the present one, and I thought it my duty to make every effort that on the occasion of such festivities that Hall, which was the principal apartment of the Palace and the one wherein the most important ceremonies were to be celebrated, might be available for enjoyment. And here I will leave it to the judgment of everyone not only in our arts but also outside them, if only he has seen the greatness and variety of that work, to decide whether the extraordinary importance of the occasion should not be my excuse if in such haste I have not given complete satisfaction in so great a variety of wars on land and sea, stormings of cities, batteries, assaults, skirmishes, buildings of cities, public councils, ceremonies ancient and modern, triumphs, and so many other things, for which, not to mention anything else, the sketches, designs, and cartoons of so great a work required a very long time. I will not speak of the nude bodies, in which the perfection of our arts consists, or of the landscapes wherein all those things were painted, all which I had to copy from nature on the actual site and spot, even as I did with the many captains, generals and other chiefs, and soldiers, that were in the emprises that I painted. In short, I will venture to say that I had occasion to depict on that ceiling almost everything that human thought and imagination can conceive; all the varieties of bodies, faces, vestments, habiliments, casques, helmets, cuirasses, various head-dresses, horses, harness, caparisons, artillery of every kind, navigations, tempests, storms of rain and snow, and so many other things, that I am not able to remember them. But anyone who sees the work may easily imagine what labours and what vigils I endured in executing with the greatest study in my power about forty large scenes, and some of them pictures ten braccia in every direction, with figures very large and in every manner. And although some of my young disciples worked with me there, they sometimes gave me assistance and sometimes not, for the reason that at times I was obliged, as they know, to repaint everything with my own hand and go over the whole picture again, to the end that all might be in one and the same manner. These stories, I say, treat of the history of Florence, from the building of the city down to the present day; the division into quarters, the cities brought to submission, the enemies vanquished, the cities subjugated, and, finally, the beginning and end of the War of Pisa on one side, and on the other likewise the beginning and end of the War of Siena, one carried on and concluded by the popular government in a period of fourteen years, and the other by the Duke in fourteen months, as may be seen; besides all the rest that is on the ceiling and will be on the walls, each eighty braccia in length and twenty in height, which I am even now painting in fresco, and hope likewise to discuss later in the above-mentioned Dialogue. And all this that I have sought to say hitherto has been for no other cause but to show with what diligence I have applied myself and still apply myself to matters of art, and with what good reasons I could excuse myself if in some cases (which I believe, indeed, are many) I have failed.

FRESCO IN THE HALL OF LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT
(After Giorgio Vasari. Florence: Palazzo Vecchio)
Brogi
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I will add, also, that about the same time I received orders to design all the arches to be shown to his Excellency for the purpose of determining the whole arrangement of the numerous festive preparations already described, executed in Florence for the nuptials of the most illustrious Lord Prince, of which I had then to carry into execution and finish a great part; to cause to be painted after my designs, in ten pictures each fourteen braccia high and eleven broad, all the squares of the principal cities of the dominion, drawn in perspective with their original builders and their devices; also, to have finished the head-wall of the above-named Hall, begun by Bandinelli, and to have a scene made for the other, the greatest and richest that was ever made by anyone; and, finally, to execute the principal stairs of that Palace, with their vestibules, the court and the columns, in the manner that everyone knows and that has been described above, with fifteen cities of the Empire and of the Tyrol depicted from the reality in as many pictures. Not little, also, has been the time that I have spent in those same days in pushing forward the construction, from the time when I first began it, of the loggia and the vast fabric of the Magistrates, facing towards the River Arno, than which I have never had built anything more difficult or more dangerous, from its being founded over the river, and even, one might say, in the air. But it was necessary, besides other reasons, in order to attach to it, as has been done, the great corridor which crosses the river and goes from the Ducal Palace to the Palace and Garden of the Pitti; which corridor was built under my direction and after my design in five months, although it is a work that one might think impossible to finish in less than five years. In addition, it was also my task to cause to be reconstructed and increased for the same nuptials, in the great tribune of S. Spirito, the new machinery for the festival that used to be held in S. Felice in Piazza; which was all reduced to the greatest possible perfection, so that there are no longer any of those dangers that used to be incurred in that festival. And under my charge, likewise, have been the works of the Palace and Church of the Knights of S. Stephen at Pisa, and the tribune, or rather, cupola, of the Madonna dell' Umiltà in Pistoia, which is a work of the greatest importance. For all which, without excusing my imperfection, which I know only too well, if I have achieved anything of the good, I render infinite thanks to God, from whom I still hope to have such help that I may see finished, whenever that may be, the terrible undertaking of the walls in the Hall, to the full satisfaction of my Lords, who already for a period of thirteen years have given me opportunities to execute vast works with honour and profit for myself; after which, weary, aged, and outworn, I may be at rest. And if for various reasons I have executed the works described for the most part with something of rapidity and haste, this I hope to do at my leisure, seeing that the Lord Duke is content that I should not press it, but should do it at my ease, granting me all the repose and recreation that I myself could desire. Thus, last year, being tired by the many works described above, he gave me leave that I might go about for some months to divert myself, and so, setting out to travel, I passed over little less than the whole of Italy, seeing again innumerable friends and patrons and the works of various excellent craftsmen, as I have related above in another connection. Finally, being in Rome on my way to return to Florence, I went to kiss the feet of the most holy and most blessed Pope Pius V, and he commissioned me to execute for him in Florence an altar-picture for sending to his Convent and Church of Bosco, which he was then having built in his native place, near Alessandria della Paglia.

Having then returned to Florence, remembering the command that his Holiness had laid upon me and the many marks of affection that he had shown, I painted for him, as he had commissioned me, an altar-picture of the Adoration of the Magi; and when he heard that it had been carried by me to completion, he sent me a message that to please him, and that he might confer with me over some thoughts in his mind, I should go with that picture to Rome, but particularly for the purpose of discussing the fabric of S. Pietro, which he showed himself to have very much at heart. Having therefore made preparations with a hundred crowns that he sent me for that purpose, and having sent the picture before me, I went to Rome; and after I had been there a month and had had many conversations with his Holiness, and had advised him not to permit any alterations to be made in the arrangements of Buonarroti for the fabric of S. Pietro, and had executed some designs, he commanded me to make for the high-altar of that Church of Bosco not an altar-picture such as is customary, but an immense structure almost in the manner of a triumphal arch, with two large panels, one in front and the other behind, and in smaller pictures about thirty scenes filled with many figures; all which have been carried very near completion.