his workmen and
friends could take what they needed without saying a word to him. He
passed his old age most joyously, and, having become decrepit, he had to
be succoured by Cosimo and by others of his friends, being no longer
able to work. It is said that Cosimo, being at the point of death,
recommended him to the care of his son Piero, who, as a most diligent
executor of his father's wishes, gave him a farm at Cafaggiuolo, which
produced enough to enable him to live in comfort. At this Donato made
great rejoicing, thinking that he was thus more than secure from the
danger of dying of hunger; but he had not held it a year before he
returned to Piero and gave it back to him by public contract, declaring
that he refused to lose his peace of mind by having to think of
household cares and listen to the importunity of the peasant, who kept
pestering him every third day--now because the wind had unroofed his
dovecote, now because his cattle had been seized by the Commune for
taxes, and now because a storm had robbed him of his wine and his fruit.
He was so weary and disgusted with all this, that he would rather die of
hunger than have to think of so many things. Piero laughed at the
simplicity of Donato; and in order to deliver him from this torment, he
accepted the farm (for on this Donato insisted), and assigned him an
allowance of the same value or more from his own bank, to be paid in
cash, which was handed over to him every week in the due proportion
owing to him; whereby he was greatly contented. Thus, as a servant and
friend of the house of Medici, he lived happily and free from care for
the rest of his life. When he had reached the age of eighty-three,
however, he was so palsied that he could no longer work in any fashion,
and took to spending all his time in bed in a poor little house that he
had in the Via del Cocomero, near the Nunnery of S. Niccolo; where,
growing worse from day to day and wasting away little by little, he died
on December 13, 1466. He was buried in the Church of S. Lorenzo, near
the tomb of Cosimo, as he had himself directed, to the end that his dead
body might be near him, even as he had been ever near him in spirit when
alive.

His death caused great grief to his fellow-citizens, to the craftsmen,
and to all who knew him when living. Wherefore, in order to honour him
more after death than they had done in his life, they gave him most
honourable obsequies in the aforesaid church, and he was acc