r Tommaso de' Cavalieri, who
has always favoured him, has caused him to paint after the design of
Michelagnolo an altar-picture of the Annunciation of the Virgin, most
beautiful, for the Church of S. Giovanni Laterano; which design by
Buonarroti's own hand, imitated by this Marcello, Leonardo Buonarroti,
the nephew of Michelagnolo, presented to the Lord Duke Cosimo
together with some others of fortifications and architecture and other
things of the rarest. And this must suffice for Marcello, who has been
attending lately to working at little things, executing them with a
truly supreme and incredible patience.

Of Jacopo del Conte, a Florentine, who like those named above dwells
in Rome, enough will have been said, what with this and other places,
after certain other particulars have been given here. This Jacopo,
then, having been much inclined from his earliest youth to portraying
from the life, has desired that this should be his principal
profession, although on occasions he has executed altar-pictures and
works in fresco in some numbers, both in Rome and without. Of his
portraits--not to speak of them all, which would make a very long
story--I shall say only that he has portrayed all the Pontiffs that
there have been from Pope Paul III to the present day, and all the
lords and ambassadors of importance who have been at that Court, and
likewise the military captains and great men of the house of Colonna
and of the Orsini, Signor Piero Strozzi, and an infinite number of
Bishops, Cardinals, and other great prelates and lords, not to speak
of many men of letters and other men of quality; all which has caused
him to acquire fame, honour, and profit in Rome, so that he lives
honourably and much at his ease with his family in that city. From his
boyhood he drew so well that he gave promise, if he should persevere,
of becoming excellent, and so in truth he would have been, but, as I
have said, he turned to that to which he felt himself inclined by
nature. Nevertheless, his works cannot but be praised. By his hand is
a Dead Christ in an altar-piece that is in the Church of the Popolo,
and in another that he has executed for the Chapel of S. Dionigi in S.
Luigi, with stories, is the first-named Saint. But the most beautiful
work that he ever did was in two scenes in fresco that he once
painted, as has been told in another place, in the Florentine Company
of the Misericordia, with an altar-picture of Christ taken down from
the