benediction,
with two little nude Angels flying through the air, who are very
beautiful; which picture is over an altar in the little Church of the
Sisters of S. Clemente in the Via di S. Gallo. He carried to
completion, likewise, a picture of a Pieta with certain nude Angels,
which was a very beautiful work, and held very dear by certain
merchants of Ragusa, for whom he painted it; but most beautiful of all
in this picture was a landscape taken for the most part from an
engraving by Albrecht Duerer. He also painted a picture of Our Lady
with the Child in her arms, and some little Angels about her, which is
now in the house of Alessandro Neroni; and for certain Spaniards he
executed another like it--that is, of the Madonna--but different from
the one described above and in another manner, which picture, being
for sale in a second-hand dealer's shop many years after, was bought
by Bartolommeo Panciatichi at the suggestion of Bronzino.

Then, in the year 1522, there being a slight outbreak of plague in
Florence, and many persons therefore departing in order to avoid that
most infectious sickness and to save themselves, an occasion presented
itself to Jacopo of flying the city and removing himself to some
distance, for a certain Prior of the Certosa, a place built by the
Acciaiuoli three miles away from Florence, had to have some pictures
painted in fresco at the corners of a very large and beautiful
cloister that surrounds a lawn, and Jacopo was brought to his notice;
whereupon the Prior had him sought out, and he, having accepted the
work very willingly at such a time, went off to Certosa, taking with
him only Bronzino. There, after a trial of that mode of life, that
quiet, that silence, and that solitude--all things after the taste and
nature of Jacopo--he thought with such an occasion to make a special
effort in the matters of art, and to show to the world that he had
acquired greater perfection and a different manner since those works
that he had executed before. Now not long before there had come from
Germany to Florence many sheets printed from engravings done with
great subtlety with the burin by Albrecht Duerer, a most excellent
German painter and a rare engraver of plates on copper and on wood;
and, among others, many scenes, both large and small, of the Passion
of Jesus Christ, in which was all the perfection and excellence of
engraving with the burin that could ever be achieved, what with the
beauty and variet