onna and certain saints very fairly in a tabernacle on
the ponte Rubaconte in fresco. Not long after, Ser Michele di
Fruosino, master of the hospital of S. Maria Nuova at Florence, a
building founded by Folco Portinari, citizen of Florence, proposed,
as the property of the hospital had increased, to enlarge his church
outside Florence, dedicated to St Giles, which was of small
importance. Accordingly he consulted Lorenzo di Bicci, his close
friend, and on 5th September 1418 he began the new church, which was
completed in its present form in a year, and then solemnly
consecrated by Pope Martin V. at the request of Ser Michele, who was
the eighth master and a member of the family of the Portinari.
Lorenzo afterwards painted this consecration, at the desire of Ser
Michele, on the front of the church, introducing the portrait of the
Pope and of some cardinals. This work was then much admired as
something new and beautiful. For this cause Lorenzo was judged worthy
to be the first to paint in the principal church of his native city,
that is S. Maria del Fiore, where, under the windows of each chapel,
he did the saints to which they are dedicated; and afterwards, on the
pillars and through the church, he did the twelve Apostles with the
crosses of the consecration, as the church was solemnly consecrated
in that very year by Pope Eugenius IV. of Venice. In the same church
the wardens, by a public ordinance, employed him to paint on the wall
in fresco a deposition, finished in marble, in memory of the Cardinal
de' Corsini, whose effigy is there, upon the sarcophagus. Above this
is another like it, in memory of Master Luigi Marsili, a most famous
theologian, who went as ambassador with M. Luigi Giuccardini and M.
Guccio di Gino, most honoured knights, to the Duke of Anjou. Lorenzo
was afterwards invited to Arezzo by D. Laurentino, abbot of S.
Bernardo, a monastery of the order of Monte Oliveto, where he painted
scenes from the life of St Bernard in fresco for the principal chapel
for M. Carlo Marsupino. But as he was about to paint the life of St
Benedict in the cloister of the convent, after he had painted the
principal chapel of the church of S. Francesco, for Francesco de'
Bacci, the elder, where he alone did the vaulting and half the
tympanum, he fell sick of a chest affection. Accordingly he caused
himself to be carried to Florence, and left instructions that Marco
da Montepulciano, his pupil, should do these scenes from th