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There at that time was our gossip Pietro dello Canigiano, treasurer to the Empress of Constantinople, a man of great understanding and subtle wit and a fast friend of Salabaetto and his family; and to him, as to a very discreet man, the disconsolate Florentine recounted that which he had done and the mischance that had befallen him, requiring him of aid and counsel, so he might contrive to gain his living there, and avouching his intention nevermore to return to Florence.
This beautiful and very ancient church stands on the site of an oratory of S. Maria dello Spasimo, destroyed, as it is said, in the tenth century. It was built by the monks of Vallombrosa, and was therefore in the hands of Benedictines.
Although Dello the Florentine, while he lived, had only the name of painter, which he has had ever since, he applied himself none the less also to sculpture nay, his first works were in sculpture, seeing that, long before he began to paint, he made in terra-cotta a Coronation of Our Lady in the arch that is over the door of the Church of S. Maria Nuova, and, within the church, the twelve Apostles; and, in the Church of the Servi, a Dead Christ in the lap of the Virgin, with many other works throughout the whole city.
And we only parted in the Piazza dello Statuto after having agreed to meet there on the following Sunday, and go to the Vittorio Emanuele to see the distribution of prizes to the graduates of the evening schools. What a beautiful day! How happy I should have been on my return home, had I not encountered my poor schoolmistress!
The names of the streets had terrible meaning: there was the Vicolo della Corda, and the Corda was the rope by which criminals were hoisted twenty feet in the air, and allowed to drop till their toes were just above the ground; there was the Piazza della Berlina Vecchia, the place of the Old Pillory; there was a little church known as the 'Church of the Gallows'; and there was a lane ominously called Vicolo dello Mastro; the Mastro was the Master of judicial executions, in other words, the Executioner himself.
Y para remedio dello, el año pasado comencé á ponello en latin, para siendo examinado y aprobado, imprimillo, dando por cosa agena y no mia todo lo que anduviese en vulgar y escrito de mano. Y por la falta de salud que he tenido como es notorio, no lo he podido acabar.
In the winter sunshine I wandered about the busy, old-world streets of Florence, idling in the cafés, gazing into the many shop-windows of the dealers in faked pictures and faked antiques, while often my wandering footsteps led me into one or other of the "sights" of the city, all of which I had visited before the National Museum at the Bargello, the Laurenziana Library, with its rows of priceless chained manuscripts, the Chiostro dello Scalzo, where Andrea del Sarto's wonderful frescoes adorn the walls, or into the Palazzo Vecchio, or the galleries of the Pitti, or the Uffizi.
A few steps farther on the left, towards the Fiesole heights, which we can see rising at the end of the street, we come, at No. 69, to a little doorway which leads to a little courtyard the Chiostro dello Scalzo decorated with frescoes by Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio and containing the earliest work of both artists.
Dello was no very good draughtsman, but was well among the first who began to show judgment in revealing the muscles in nude bodies, as it is seen from some drawings in our book, made by him in chiaroscuro. He was portrayed in chiaroscuro by Paolo Uccello in S. Maria Novella, in the story wherein Noah is made drunk by his son Ham.
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