[224] The final payment is dated 9th June, 1477.
[225] Mil. Doc., vol. i., p. 53. The compiler in this note promises to give more particulars about him further on, but does not do so; and I can find nothing more elsewhere.
[226] Archivio de’ Contratti. Rogiti di Ser Filiziano Nerini. According to Padre de Angelis (Vita del Beato Pietro Pettinaio, p. 124) the artist received 900 florins, of four lire each, for the pavement and altar decorations; and his designs on two sheets of paper, one green and the other plain, signed with his name and the date 1504, are to be found in vol. 69, in the Archives of the Piccolomini family.
[227] According to Padre Micheli (La Guida Artistica, p. 131) these Virtues were executed from designs by Pacchiarotto, but I find no authority for that assertion, which seems to contradict the statement made by Padre de Angelis above.
[228] V. Lusini. Storia della Basilica di S. Francesco a Siena, pp. 143, and 282.
[229] Mil. Doc., vol. iii., p. 77.
[230] Faluschi MSS. Chiese Senesi, A-F, pp. 154 (on the back) and 148 (on the back).
[231] This border of waterfowl may possibly allude to the Contrada of the Oca (the Goose) of which Contrada Sta. Caterina was the especial Patroness, she having lived in their ward and their chapel being in her former home.
Note.—The tomb of the Cennini family, before the High Altar in S. Francesco is a degraded seventeenth-century specimen of this kind of work, but it is so debased in taste, and so injured by time, that I hardly like drawing attention to it.
[232] An instance of this debased, but by some admired, artifice may be seen in the church of S. Giorgio in Siena, on the memorial slab to the artist, Francesco Vanni, executed in 1656, by his son, Michel Angelo.