" Then, turning to the other
neighbours, he convinced them so well of the grave import of the matter,
that they all said to Capodoca that Buonamico was speaking the truth and
that it must be done as he advised. He, therefore, believing that it was
so, commanded her not to rise in the night, and the pot was then
reasonably salted, save when perchance the woman on occasion rose early,
for then Buffalmacco would return to his remedy, which finally brought
it about that Capodoca made her give it up completely.

Buffalmacco, then, among the first works that he made, painted with his
own hand the whole church of the Convent of the Nuns of Faenza, which
stood in Florence on the site of the present Cittadella del Prato; and
among other scenes that he made there from the life of Christ, in all
which he acquitted himself very well, he made the Massacre that Herod
ordained of the Innocents, wherein he expressed very vividly the
emotions both of the murderers and of the other figures; for in some
nurses and mothers who are snatching the infants from the hands of the
murderers and are seeking all the assistance that they can from their
hands, their nails, their teeth, and every movement of the body, there
is shown on the surface a heart no less full of rage and fury than of
woe.

Of this work, that convent being to-day in ruins, there is to be seen
nothing but a coloured sketch in our book of drawings by diverse
masters, wherein there is this scene drawn by the hand of Buonamico
himself. In the doing of this work for the aforesaid Nuns of Faenza,
seeing that Buffalmacco was a person very eccentric and careless both in
dress and in manner of life, it came to pass, since he did not always
wear his cap and his mantle, as in those times it was the custom to do,
that the nuns, seeing him once through the screen that he had caused to
be made, began to say to the steward that it did not please them to see
him in that guise, in his jerkin; however, appeased by him, they stayed
for a little without saying more. But at last, seeing him ever in the
same guise, and doubting whether he was not some knavish boy for
grinding colours, they had him told by the Abbess that they would have
liked to see the master at work, and not always him. To which Buonamico
answered, like the good fellow that he was, that as soon as the master
was there, he would let them know; taking notice, none the less, of the
little confidence that they had in him. Taking a s