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This picture is one of four panels executed for the Bartolini family. One of the others is in the Louvre, and a third in the Uffizi. Strangely enough, this equestrian portrait commemorates an Englishman, Sir John Hawkwood, whose name is Italianized in the inscription into Giovanni Acuto.
In S. Maria del Fiore, in memory of Giovanni Acuto, an Englishman, Captain of the Florentines, who had died in the year 1393, he made in terra-verde a horse of extraordinary grandeur, which was held very beautiful, and on it the image of the Captain himself, in chiaroscuro and coloured with terra-verde, in a picture ten braccia high on the middle of one wall of the church; where Paolo drew in perspective a large sarcophagus, supposed to contain the corpse, and over this he placed the image of him in his Captain's armour, on horseback.
Aristorenas shook his head, and that too when Don Primitivo's Latin was easy to understand, for he talked of an gallus talisainus, acuto tari armatus, an gallus beati Petri bulikus sasabungus sit, and so on, until at length he decided to resort to the argument which many use to convince and silence their opponents. "You're going to be damned, friend Martin, you're falling into heresy!
Yet little though there be to interest the curious, Giovanni Acuto, that Englishman Sir John Hawkwood of the White Company, one of the first of the Condottieri, the deliverer of Pisa, "the first real general of modern times," is buried here. You may see his equestrian portrait by Paolo Uccello over the north-west doorway in his habit as he lived.
Ut picus avis admittatur, qui acuto rostra intra ipsorum inguina foramen effodiat, constituerunt: ipsismet caracaracolibus hominibus callosis, feminas apertis cruribus tenentibus. Quam pulchre picus adducitur! Picus feminis sexum aperit. Hinc bellissime habuit insula, quas cupiebat feminas; hinc procreata soboles.
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