h more
diligence and grace than the large ones. This work is noteworthy, not
only because the little figures in it are so carefully finished that
they resemble the work of an illuminator, but because it is a
wonderful thing that a picture on canvas should have lasted three
hundred years. He did an extraordinary number of pictures for all the
city, and a St Francis drawn from life at Sargiano, a convent of the
bare-footed friars. To this he placed his name, because he considered
that it was more than usually well done. He afterwards made a large
crucifix in wood, painted in the Byzantine manner, and sent it to
Florence to M. Farinata degli Uberti, a most famous citizen who, in
addition to many other notable exploits, had saved his native city
from imminent danger and ruin. This crucifix is now in S. Croce,
between the chapel of the Peruzzi and that of the Giugni. In S.
Domenico, at Arezzo, a church and convent built by the lords of
Pietramela in the year 1275, as their coat of arms proves, he did
many things before returning to Rome, where he had already given
great satisfaction to Pope Urban IV. by doing some things in fresco
for him in the portico of St Peter's; for although in the Byzantine
style of the time, they were not without merit. After he had
finished a St Francis at Ganghereto, a place above Terranuova in the
Valdarno, he devoted himself to sculpture, as he was of an ambitious
spirit, and he studied with such diligence that he succeeded much
better than he had done in painting; for although his first
sculptures were in the Byzantine style, as may be seen in four
figures in wood of a Deposition from the Cross in the Pieve, and some
other figures in relief which are in the chapel of St Francis above
the baptismal font, yet he adopted a much better manner after he had
visited Florence and had seen the works of Arnolfo, and of the other
more celebrated sculptors of the time. In the year 1275 he returned
to Arezzo in the suite of Pope Gregory, who passed through Florence
on his journey from Avignon to Rome. Here an opportunity presented
itself to make himself better known, for the Pope died at Arezzo
after having given 30,000 scudi to the Commune wherewith to finish
the building of the Vescovado which had been begun by Master Lapo,
and had made but little progress. The Aretines therefore ordained
that the chapel of St Gregory should be made in memory of the Pope in
the Vescovado, in which Margaritone afterwards pl