Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/107

Rh windows are certain letters inscribed on the façade, the purport of which is rather divined than ascertained, for they are neither well formed nor clearly written ; but we gather from them the date of the building, and under whose government it was erected. given by Margaritone. He died at the age of seventy-seven, afflicted and disgusted—as it is said—that he had lived to see the changes by which all honours were transferred to new artists. He was buried in the Duomo Vecchio, without the city of Arezzo, in a tomb of Travertine, which has been destroyed in our own days by the demolition of that church. The following epitaph was written for him : “ Hic jacet ille bonus pictura Margaritonus, Cui requiem Dominus tradat ubique pius.” The portrait of Margaritone was also in the Duomo Vecchio, in a picture of the, by , and was copied by myself before the church was destroyed.

The gratitude which the masters in painting owe to Nature—who is ever the truest model of him who, possessing the power to select the brightest parts from her best and loveliest features, employs himself unweariedly in the reproduction of these beauties—this gratitude, I say, is due, in my judgment, to the Florentine painter,, seeing that he alone—although born amidst incapable artists, and at a time when all good methods in art had long been entombed beneath the