ords for drawing weights, of windlasses, and of lines;
besides that he has discovered a method of fusing rock-crystal with ease
and of purifying it, and has made with it scenes and vases of several
colours; for Bernardo occupies himself with everything. This, also, will
be seen in a short time in the making of vases of porcelain with all the
perfection of the most ancient and most perfect; in which at the present
day a most excellent master is Giulio da Urbino, who is in the service
of the most illustrious Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara, and does stupendous
things in the way of vases with several kinds of clay, and to those in
porcelain he gives the most beautiful shapes, besides fashioning with
the same earth little squares, octagons, and rounds, hard and with an
extraordinary polish, for making pavements counterfeiting the appearance
of variegated marbles; of all which things our Prince has the methods of
making them. His Excellency has also caused a beginning to be made with
the executing of a study-table with precious stones, richly adorned, as
an accompaniment to another belonging to his father, Duke Cosimo. And
not long ago he had one finished after the design of Vasari, which is a
rare work, being of oriental alabaster all inlaid with great pieces of
jasper, heliotrope, cornelian, lapis-lazuli, and agate, with other
stones and jewels of price that are worth twenty thousand crowns. This
study-table has been executed by Bernardino di Porfirio of Leccio in the
neighbourhood of Florence, who is excellent in such work, and who made
for Messer Bindo Altoviti an octagon of ebony and ivory inlaid likewise
with jaspers, after the design of the same Vasari; which Bernardino is
now in the service of their Excellencies. But to return to Bernardo: in
painting, also, beyond the expectation of many, he showed that he is
able to execute large figures no less well than the small, when he
painted for the obsequies of Michelagnolo that great canvas of which we
have spoken. Bernardo was employed, also, with much credit to him, for
the nuptials of his and our Prince, in certain masquerades, in the
Triumph of Dreams, as will be told, and in the interludes of the comedy
that was performed in the Palace, as has been described exhaustively by
others. And if this man, when he was a youth (although even now he is
not past thirty), had given his attention to the studies of art as he
gave it to the methods of fortification, in which he spent no lit