works
that he made were the portrait of Messer Giovanni Gaddi and that of
Messer Annibale Caro, who were much his friends. Those finished, he
painted a very beautiful altar-piece for the Chapel of the Clerks of the
Chamber in the Pope's Palace. And in the Church of the Germans he began
a chapel in fresco for a merchant of that nation, painting on the vault
above the Apostles receiving the Holy Spirit, and in a picture that is
half-way up the wall Jesus Christ rising from the dead, with the
soldiers sleeping round the Sepulchre in various attitudes,
foreshortened in a bold and beautiful manner. On one side he painted S.
Stephen, and on the other side S. George, in two niches; and at the foot
he painted S. Giovanni Limosinario, who is giving alms to a naked
beggar, with a Charity on one side of him, and on the other side S.
Alberto, the Carmelite Friar, between Logic and Prudence. And in the
great altar-picture, finally, he painted in fresco the Dead Christ with
the Maries.

Having formed a friendship with Piero di Marcone, a Florentine
goldsmith, and having become his gossip, Francesco made to Piero's wife,
who was also his gossip, after her delivery, a present of a very
beautiful design, which was to be painted on one of those round baskets
in which food is brought to a newly-delivered woman. In that design
there was the life of man, in a number of square compartments containing
very beautiful figures, both on one side and on the other; namely, all
the ages of human life, each of which rested on a different festoon
appropriate to the particular age and the season. In that bizarre
composition were included, in two long ovals, figures of the sun and
moon, and between them Sais, a city of Egypt, standing before the Temple
of the Goddess Pallas and praying for wisdom, as if to signify that on
behalf of newborn children one should pray before any other thing for
wisdom and goodness. That design Piero held ever afterwards as dear as
if it had been, as indeed it was, a most beautiful jewel.

Not long afterwards, the above-named Piero and other friends having
written to Francesco that he would do well to return to his native
place, for the reason that it was held to be certain that he would be
employed by the Lord Duke Cosimo, who had no masters about him save such
as were slow and irresolute, he finally determined (trusting much, also,
in the favour of M. Alamanno, the brother of the Cardinal and uncle of
the Duke) to return