for it has given us
portraits of many who have been included in the stories in the Palace of
Duke Cosimo. And for this we should certainly acknowledge a very great
obligation to the talent of Andrea, who was one of the first to begin to
bring the custom into use.

From this men came to make more perfect images, not only in Florence,
but in all the places in which there is devoutness, and to which people
flock to offer votive images, or, as they are called, "miracoli," in
return for some favour received. For whereas they were previously made
small and of silver, or only in the form of little panels, or rather of
wax, and very clumsy, in the time of Andrea they began to be made in a
much better manner, since Andrea, having a very strait friendship with
Orsino, a Florentine worker in wax, who had no little judgment in that
art, began to show him how he could become excellent therein. Now the
due occasion arrived in the form of the death of Giuliano de' Medici and
the danger incurred by his brother Lorenzo, who was wounded in S. Maria
del Fiore, when it was ordained by the friends and relatives of Lorenzo
that images of him should be set up in many places, to render thanks to
God for his deliverance. Wherefore Orsino, among others that he made,
executed three life-size figures of wax with the aid and direction of
Andrea, making the skeleton within of wood, after the method described
elsewhere, interwoven with split reeds, which were then covered with
waxed cloths folded and arranged so beautifully that nothing better or
more true to nature could be seen. Then he made the heads, hands, and
feet with wax of greater thickness, but hollow within, portrayed from
life, and painted in oils with all the ornaments of hair and everything
else that was necessary, so lifelike and so well wrought that they
seemed no mere images of wax, but actual living men, as may be seen in
each of the said three, one of which is in the Church of the Nuns of
Chiarito in the Via di S. Gallo, opposite to the Crucifix that works
miracles. This figure is clothed exactly as Lorenzo was, when, with his
wounded throat bandaged, he showed himself at the window of his house
before the eyes of the people, who had flocked thither to see whether he
were alive, as they hoped, or to avenge him if he were dead. The second
figure of the same man is in the lucco, the gown peculiar to the
citizens of Florence; and it stands in the Servite Church of the
Nunziata, over