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Really Tuscan in its birth, the art of the Quattrocento became at last almost wholly Florentine, a flower of the Val d'Arno or of the hills about it, where even to-day at Settignano, at Fiesole, at Majano, at Rovezzano, you may see the sculptors at work in an open bottega by the roadside, the rough-hewn marble standing here and there in many sizes and shapes, the chips and fragments strewing the highway.

They were, however, pursued by vast numbers, and Gherardo was slain upon the bridge of Affrico by Boccaccio Cavicciulli. Corso was overtaken and made prisoner by a party of Catalan horse, in the service of the Signory, at Rovezzano.

And there followed him Benedetto da Rovezzano, whose style has become classical, the sculptor of every sort of lovely furniture, mantelpieces, tabernacles, and such, yet in his beautiful reliefs of the life of S. Giovanni Gualberto you see the work of the sixteenth century at its best, without the freshness and delicate charm of fifteenth-century sculpture, but exquisite enough in its perfect skill, its real achievement.

On August 12, 1502, Michael Angelo undertook another commission for the Republicanother giant David. This time it was to be in bronze, two cubits and a quarter in height; in the casting he was to be assisted by Benedetto da Rovezzano.

He also made a most beautiful model of wood, with the figures in wax, of a tomb for the King of England, which in the end was not carried out by Baccio, but was given to the sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano, who executed it in metal.

At the end is a fireplace from the Casa Borgherini, by Benedetto da Rovezzano, which probably has not an equal, although the pietra serena of which it is made is a horrid hue; and on the walls are fragments of the tomb of S. Giovanni Gualberto at Vallombrosa, designed by the same artist but never finished.

Plastic art Blood-soaked stones The faithful artists Michelangelo Italian custodians The famous Davids Michelangelo's tondo Brutus Benedetto da Rovezzano Donatello's life-work The S. George Verrocchio Ghiberti and Brunelleschi and the Baptistery doors Benvenuto Cellini John of Bologna Antonio Pollaiuolo Verrocchio again Mino da Fiesole The Florentine wealth of sculpture Beautiful ladies The della Robbias South Kensington and the Louvre.

I picked up a stranger this morning as I was coming in from Rovezzano, and I can spell him out no better than I can the letters on that scarf I bought from the French cavalier. It isn't my wits are at fault, I want no man to help me tell peas from paternosters, but when you come to foreign fashions, a fool may happen to know more than a wise man."

Not long afterwards he returned one summer to Florence, having a good name among craftsmen, and Baccio Bandinelli, who was making the Orpheus of marble that was placed in the court of the Medici Palace, after having the base for that work carried out by Benedetto da Rovezzano, caused Simone to execute the festoons and other carvings therein, which are very beautiful, although one festoon is unfinished and only worked over with the gradine.

In those days Bernardo del Bianco had caused to be erected, in the Badia of Florence, a chapel of grey-stone, full of carving, and very rich and beautiful, from the design of Benedetto da Rovezzano: which chapel was and still is much esteemed on account of some ornamental work of great variety, wherein Benedetto Buglioni placed, in some niches, angels and other figures made of glazed terra-cotta, in the round, to adorn it the more, with friezes containing cherubs and the devices of Bianco.