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In addition to these works, that garden was full of torsi of men and women, which were a school not only for Mariotto, but for all the sculptors and painters of his time. A good part of these are now in the guardaroba of Duke Cosimo, and others, such as the two torsi of Marsyas, the heads over the windows, and those of the Emperors over the doors, are still in the same place.
He left, likewise, some torsi of figures, and many other things; and all were dispersed together with the property of Lorenzo, some being sold to Messer Giovanni Gaddi, then Clerk of the Chamber to the Pope, and among these was the said bed of Polycletus, with the rest of the finer things. Bonaccorso had a son called Vittorio, who survived him.
He tried his hand at painting on the wall, on fresh plaster, and executed on the walls of his house heads, arms, legs, and torsi, coloured in various ways; but, perceiving that this involved him in greater difficulties than he had expected, through the drying of the plaster, he returned to his former study of working in relief.
Meanwhile Mariotto was revelling in the Eden of art, drawing daily beneath the Loggie where the orange-trees grew close to the pillars from the exquisite statues and "torsi," peopling the shades with white forms, or copying cartoons by the older masters, which hung against the walls.
And although there may be seen in this work some bit of a torso with the back turned or facing to the front and some attachments of flanks, executed with marvellous care and great labour by Jacopo, who made finished models of clay in the round for almost all the figures, nevertheless the work as a whole is foreign to his manner, and, as it appears to almost every man, without proportion, the torsi for the most part being large and the legs and arms small, to say nothing of the heads, in which there is not a trace to be seen of that singular excellence and grace that he used to give to them, so greatly to the satisfaction of those who examine his other pictures.
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