ore brilliant and lustrous. Take away the real
armour, and you will then see that your counterfeit armour is not such
poor stuff as you think it."

That picture, when it was finished, I gave to the Duke, and the Duke
presented it to M. Ottaviano de' Medici, in whose house it has been up
to the present day, in company with the portrait of Caterina, the then
young sister of the Duke, and afterwards Queen of France, and that of
the Magnificent Lorenzo, the Elder. And in the same house are three
pictures also by my hand and executed in my youth; in one is Abraham
sacrificing Isaac, in the second Christ in the Garden, and in the third
His Supper with the Apostles. Meanwhile Cardinal Ippolito died, in whom
was centred the sum of all my hopes, and I began to recognize how vain
generally are the hopes of this world, and that a man must trust mostly
in himself and in being of some account. After these works, perceiving
that the Duke was all given over to fortifications and to building, I
began, the better to be able to serve him, to give attention to matters
of architecture, and spent much time upon them. But meanwhile, festive
preparations having to be made in Florence in the year 1536 for
receiving the Emperor Charles V, the Duke, in giving orders for that,
commanded the deputies charged with the care of those pomps, as has been
related in the Life of Tribolo, that they should have me with them to
design all the arches and other ornaments to be made for that entry.
Which done, there was allotted to me for my benefit, besides the great
banners of the castle and fortress, as has been told, the facade in the
manner of a triumphal arch that was constructed at S. Felice in Piazza,
forty braccia high and twenty wide, and then the ornamentation of the
Porta a S. Piero Gattolini; works all great and beyond my strength. And,
what was worse, those favours having drawn down upon me a thousand
envious thoughts, about twenty men who were helping me to do the banners
and the other labours left me nicely in the lurch, at the persuasion of
one person or another, to the end that I might not be able to execute
works so many and of such importance. But I, who had foreseen the malice
of such creatures (to whom I had always sought to give assistance),
partly labouring with my own hand day and night, and partly aided by
painters brought in from without, who helped me secretly, attended to my
business, and strove to conquer all such difficulties and