ters of architecture, he built for Messer Marco Coscia
a very beautiful loggia on the road that leads to Rome, at Pontemolle
on the Via Appia.[11] For the Company of the Crocifisso, attached to
the Church of S. Marcello, he made a Crucifix for carrying in
procession, a thing full of grace; and for Cardinal Antonio di Monte
he began a great fabric at his villa without Rome, on the Acqua
Vergine. And by the hand of Jacopo, perhaps, is a very beautiful
portrait in marble of that elder Cardinal di Monte which is now in the
Palace of Signor Fabiano at Monte Sansovino, over the door of the
principal chamber off the hall. He directed, also, the building of the
house of Messer Luigi Leoni, a most commodious edifice, and in the
Banchi a palace beside the house of the Gaddi, which was bought
afterwards by Filippo Strozzi--certainly a commodious and most
beautiful fabric, with many ornaments.

[Footnote 11: Via Flaminia.]

At this time, with the favour of Pope Leo, the Florentine colony had
bestirred itself out of emulation of the Germans, Spaniards, and
Frenchmen, who had either begun or finished the churches of their
colonies in Rome, and had begun to perform their solemn offices in
those already built and adorned; and the Florentines had sought leave
likewise to build a church for themselves. For which the Pope having
given instructions to Lodovico Capponi, the Consul of the Florentine
colony at that time, it was determined that behind the Banchi, at the
beginning of the Strada Giulia, on the bank of the Tiber, an immense
church should be built, to be dedicated to S. John the Baptist; which
might surpass in magnificence, grandeur, cost, ornamentation, and
design, the churches of all the other colonies. There competed, then,
in making designs for this work, Raffaello da Urbino, Antonio da San
Gallo, Baldassarre da Siena, and Sansovino; and the Pope, when he had
seen all their designs, extolled as the best that of Sansovino,
because, besides other things, he had made at each of the four corners
of that church a tribune, and a larger tribune in the centre, after
the likeness of the plan that Sebastiano Serlio placed in his second
book on Architecture. Whereupon, all the heads of the Florentine
colony concurring with the will of the Pope, with much approval of
Sansovino, the foundations were begun for a part of that church,
altogether twenty-two canne[12] in length. But, there being not enough
space, and yet wishing to m