Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/104

90 for different quarters of the city : and one, for the convent of the Friars de’ Zoccoli, at Sargiano, a, a portrait, and on which he has placed his name, as being a work which, according to his own opinion, he had executed more successfully than common. Having afterwards completed a large crucifix in wood, painted in the Greek manner, he sent it to Florence to Messer Farinata degli Uberti, a most illustrious citizen, who, among many other great and excellent deeds, had liberated his country from imminent danger and ruin. This crucifix is now in, between the , and. In, a church and convent built by the lords of Pietramala, in 1275, as the inscriptions prove, Margaritone executed many works before returning to Rome, where he had previously been in high favour with Pope Urban IV, and where, by command of that Pontiff, he executed some frescoes in the portico of St. Peter’s, which, though in the Greek manner then prevailing, were very tolerable for those times. Margaritone also painted a picture of, at Ganghereto, a small town above the Terra Nuova in Valdarno, and afterwards, possessing an elevated mind, he betook himself to sculpture, and that with so much diligence, that he succeeded better than he had done in painting : for, although his first efforts in sculpture were in the Greek manner, as we perceive from four figures in wood, which make part of a Deposition from the Cross, in the Church of San Francesco, with other figures in high relief, placed over the baptismal font in the Chapel of St. Francis, he nevertheless acquired a better manner when he had seen the works of Arnolfo in Florence, with those of the other eminent sculptors of the time. And having returned to Arezzo in the year 1275, with the court of Pope Gregory, who passed through Florence, on his way from Avignon to Rome, he had an opportunity of making himself better known ; for that pontiff dying at Arezzo, after bestowing thirty thousand crowns on the commune, for the completion of the episcopal palace commenced by Maestro