ars, he continued to work at various things, in order to pass the
time and not to live in idleness; but also consuming his life and his
money in seeking to congeal mercury, in company with a man of like brain
called Raffaello Baglioni. Giovan Francesco painted a picture in oils
three braccia in breadth and two in height, of the Conversion of S.
Paul, full of different kinds of horses ridden by the soldiers of that
Saint, with various beautiful attitudes and foreshortenings; which
painting, together with many other works by the hand of the same master,
is in the possession of the heirs of the above-named Piero Martelli, to
whom he gave it. In a little picture he painted a hunting-scene full of
various animals, which is a very bizarre and pleasing work; and it now
belongs to Lorenzo Borghini, who holds it dear, as one who much delights
in the treasures of our arts. For the Nuns of S. Luca, in the Via di S.
Gallo, he executed in clay, in half-relief, a Christ in the Garden who
is appearing to Mary Magdalene, which was afterwards glazed by Giovanni
della Robbia and placed on an altar in the church of those sisters,
within an ornament of grey sandstone. For Jacopo Salviati the elder, of
whom he was much the friend, he made a most beautiful medallion of
marble, containing a Madonna, for the chapel in his palace above the
Ponte alla Badia, and, round the courtyard, many medallions filled with
figures of terra-cotta, together with other very beautiful ornaments,
which were for the most part, nay, almost all, destroyed by the soldiers
in the year of the siege, when the palace was set on fire by the party
hostile to the Medici. And since Giovan Francesco had a great affection
for that place, he would set out at times from Florence to go there just
as he was, in his lucco;[9] and once out of the city he would throw it
over his shoulder and slowly wander all by himself, lost in
contemplation, until he was there. One day among others, being on that
road, and the day being hot, he hid the lucco in a thicket of
thorn-bushes, and, having reached the palace, had been there two days
before he remembered it. In the end, sending his man to look for it,
when he saw that he had found it he said: "The world is too good to last
long."

[Footnote 9: A long gown worn by the Florentine citizens,
particularly on occasions of ceremony.]

Giovan Francesco was a man of surpassing goodness, and very loving to
the poor, insomuch that