rything being given over to sack, the picture was lost,
together with the designs executed in the chapel and all that poor
Giovanni Antonio possessed. He, after having been much tormented by the
Spaniards to induce him to pay a ransom, escaped in his shirt one night
with some other prisoners, and, after suffering desperate hardships and
running in great danger of his life, because the roads were not safe,
finally made his way to Arezzo, where he was received by M. Giovanni
Pollastra, a man of great learning, who was his uncle; but he had all
that he could do to recover himself, so broken was he by terror and
suffering.

Then in the same year there came upon Arezzo the great plague in which
four hundred persons died every day, and Giovanni Antonio was forced
once more to fly, all in despair and very loth to go, and to stay for
some months out of the city. But finally, when that pestilence had
abated to such an extent that people could begin to mix together, a
certain Fra Guasparri, a Conventual Friar of S. Francis, who was then
Guardian of their convent in that city, commissioned Giovanni Antonio to
paint the altar-piece of the high-altar in that church for one hundred
crowns, stipulating that he should represent in it the Adoration of the
Magi. Whereupon Lappoli, hearing that Rosso, having also fled from Rome,
was at Borgo a San Sepolcro, and was there executing an altar-piece for
the Company of S. Croce, went to visit him; and after showing him many
courtesies and causing some things to be brought for him from Arezzo, of
which he knew him to stand in need, since he had lost everything in the
sack of Rome, he obtained for himself from Rosso a very beautiful design
of the above-mentioned altar-piece that he had to paint for Fra
Guasparri. And when he had returned to Arezzo he set his hand to the
work, and finished it within a year from the day of the commission,
according to the agreement, and that so well, that he was very highly
praised for it. That design of Rosso's passed afterwards into the hands
of Giorgio Vasari, and from him to the very reverend Don Vincenzio
Borghini, Director of the Hospital of the Innocenti in Florence, who has
it in his book of drawings by various painters.

Not long afterwards, having become surety for Rosso to the amount of
three hundred crowns, in the matter of some pictures that the said Rosso
was to paint in the Madonna delle Lagrime, Giovanni Antonio found
himself in a very evil pass,