re wont to assemble, there were first painted on the wall
without the door some of those figures that are generally painted on the
walls and porticoes of hospitals, such as the director of the hospital,
with gestures full of charity, inviting and receiving beggars and
pilgrims. This picture being uncovered late on the evening of the feast,
there began to arrive the men of the Company, who, after knocking and
being received at the entrance by the director of the hospital, made
their way into a great room arranged in the manner of a hospital, with
the beds at the sides and other suchlike things. In the middle of that
room, round a great fire, were Bientina, Battista dell'Ottonaio,
Barlacchi, Baia, and other merry spirits, dressed after the manner of
beggars, wastrels, and gallows-birds, who, pretending not to be seen by
those who came in from time to time and gathered into a circle, and
conversing of the men of the Company and also of themselves, said the
hardest things in the world about those who had thrown away their all
and spent on suppers and feasts much more than was right. Which
discourse finished, when it was seen that all who were to be there had
arrived, in came S. Andrew, their Patron Saint, who, leading them out of
the hospital, took them into another room, magnificently furnished,
where they sat down to table and had a joyous supper. Then the Saint
laughingly commanded them that, in order not to be too wasteful with
their superfluous expenses, so that they might keep well away from
hospitals, they should be contented with one feast, a grand and solemn
affair, every year; after which he went his way. And they obeyed him,
holding a most beautiful supper, with a comedy, every year over a long
period of time; and thus there were performed at various times, as was
related in the Life of Aristotile da San Gallo, the Calandra of M.
Bernardo, Cardinal of Bibbiena, the Suppositi and the Cassaria of
Ariosto, and the Clizia and Mandragola of Macchiavelli, with many
others.

Francesco and Domenico Rucellai, for the feast that it fell to them to
give when they were masters of the Company, performed first the Arpie of
Fineo, and the second time, after a disputation of philosophers on the
Trinity, they caused to be represented S. Andrew throwing open a Heaven
with all the choirs of the Angels, which was in truth a very rare
spectacle. And Giovanni Gaddi, with the help of Jacopo Sansovino, Andrea
del Sarto, and Giovan Franc