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See Varchi, vol. iii. p. 61, for the first stone laid of this castle. It should be said that accounts disagree about Filippo's death. Nerli very distinctly asserts that he committed suicide. Segni inclines to the belief that he was murdered by the creatures of Duke Cosimo.
Thus, by showing them his treatment of hair, executed with such facility, for all the difficulty of painting it, he taught them how it should be painted; for which all painters owe him an everlasting debt. At their instance the following epigram was written to him by Messer Fabio Segni, a gentleman of Florence: Hujus cum regeret mortales spiritus artus Pictoris, Charites supplicuere Jovi.
Segni shared the anxieties of Nicolo Capponi, when the Gonfalonier was impeached for high treason to the state of Florence. This list might be extended almost indefinitely, with the object of proving the intimate connection which subsisted at Florence between the thinkers and the actors.
This legacy bore bitter fruits in the next century. If it was the memory of the Friar which nerved the citizens of Florence to sustain the siege of 1528, the same memory bound them to seek aid from inconsequent Francis, and to hope that at the last moment a cohort of seraphim would defend their walls. Segni, Ist.
While he desired the liberty of Florence, Segni saw that the republic could not hold its own against both Pope and Emperor, at a crisis when the King of France, who ought to have rendered assistance in the hour of need, was bound by the treaty of Cambray, and by the pledges he had given to Charles in the persons of his two sons.
He took a leading part in the controversy between the Republic of Venice and the Pope, and after the reconciliation between the two parties was obliged by the Pope to pay an annual pension of five hundred crowns out of the revenues of his see to the Bishop of Segni. This highly incensed the avaricious prelate, who immediately began to look out for himself a more lucrative piece of preferment.
Segni, alluding briefly to this flight of Michelangelo from Florence, says that he arrived at Castelnuovo with Rinaldo Corsini, and that what they communicated to Niccolò Capponi concerning the treachery of Malatesta and the state of the city, so affected the ex-Gonfalonier that he died of a fever after seven days.
All Pitti's invectives against the Ottimati, bitter as they may be, are justified by the unvarnished narrative we read upon the pages of Varchi and Segni concerning this most vicious, selfish, vain, and brilliant hero of historical romance.
There is something pathetic in this delusion of a great city, trusting with infantine pertinacity to the promises of the man whom they had seen burned as an impostor, when all the while their statesmen and their generals were striking bargains with the foe. Nardi is more sincerely Piagnone than either Segni or Varchi.
Olimpia declared that she was a starving widow and could do nothing; the corpse was thrust into a place where the masons of the Vatican kept their tools, and one of the workmen, out of charity or superstition, lit a tallow candle beside it. In the end, the maggiordomo paid for a deal coffin, and Monsignor Segni gave five scudi an English pound to have the body taken away and buried.
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