esta and in the Piazza not only those captains, but
also some citizens who had fled and had been proclaimed outlaws. He said
that he would do it; but in order not to acquire, like Andrea dal
Castagno, the name of Andrea degl' Impiccati, he gave it out that he was
entrusting the work to one of his assistants, called Bernardo del Buda.
However, having made a great enclosure, which he himself entered and
left by night, he executed those figures in such a manner that they
appeared to be the men themselves, real and alive. The soldiers, who
were painted on the facade of the old Mercatanzia in the Piazza, near
the Condotta, were covered with whitewash many years ago, that they
might be seen no longer; and the citizens, whom he painted entirely with
his own hand on the Palace of the Podesta, were destroyed in like
manner.

After this, being very intimate in these last years of his life with
certain men who governed the Company of S. Sebastiano, which is behind
the Servite Convent, Andrea made for them with his own hand a S.
Sebastian from the navel upwards, so beautiful that it might well have
seemed that these were the last strokes of the brush which he was to
make.

The siege being finished, Andrea was waiting for matters to mend,
although with little hope that his French project would succeed, since
Giovan Battista della Palla had been taken prisoner, when Florence
became filled with soldiers and stores from the camp. Among those
soldiers were some lansquenets sick of the plague, who brought no
little terror into the city and shortly afterwards left it infected.
Thereupon, either through this apprehension or through some imprudence
in eating after having suffered much privation in the siege, one day
Andrea fell grievously ill and took to his bed with death on his brow;
and finding no remedy for his illness, and being without much
attention--for his wife, from fear of the plague, kept as far away from
him as she could--he died, so it is said, almost without a soul being
aware of it; and he was buried by the men of the Scalzo with scant
ceremony in the Church of the Servi, near his own house, in the place
where the members of that Company are always buried.

The death of Andrea was a very great loss to the city and to art,
because up to the age of forty-two, which he attained, he went on always
improving from one work to another in such wise that, if he had lived
longer, he would have continued to confer benefits on art; f