humility, praying him that,
being his kinsman, he should consent to help him; but no good came of
it, for Francesco, as certain kinds of kinsmen often do, not only did
not assist him by word or deed, but reproved and repelled him harshly.
But for all that, not losing heart and not being dismayed, the poor boy
contrived to maintain himself (or we should rather say, to starve
himself) for many months in Rome by grinding colours for a small price,
now in one shop and now in another, at times also drawing something, as
best he could. And although in the end he placed himself as an assistant
with one Giovan Piero Calavrese, he did not gain much profit from that,
for the reason that his master, together with his wife, a shrew of a
woman, not only made him grind colours all day and all night, but even,
among other things, kept him in want of bread, which, lest he should be
able to have enough or to take it at his pleasure, they used to keep in
a basket hung from the ceiling, with some little bells, which would ring
at the least touch of a hand on the basket, and thus give the alarm. But
this would have caused little annoyance to Taddeo, if only he had had
any opportunity of drawing some designs by the hand of Raffaello da
Urbino that his pig of a master possessed.

On account of these and many other strange ways Taddeo left Giovan
Piero, and resolved to live by himself and to have recourse to the
workshops of Rome, where he was by that time known, spending a part of
the week in doing work for a livelihood, and the rest in drawing,
particularly the works by the hand of Raffaello that were in the house
of Agostino Chigi and in other places in Rome. And since very often,
when the evening came on, he had no place wherein to sleep, many a night
he took refuge under the loggie of the above-named Chigi's house and in
other suchlike places; which hardships did something to ruin his
constitution, and, if his youth had not helped him, they would have
killed him altogether. As it was, falling ill, and not being assisted by
his kinsman Francesco Sant'Agnolo any more than he had been before, he
returned to his father's house at Sant'Agnolo, in order not to finish
his life in such misery as that in which he had been living.

However, not to waste any more time on matters that are not of the first
importance, now that I have shown at sufficient length with what
difficulties and hardships he made his proficience, let me relate that
Taddeo,