Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/240

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the old proverb, that a spendthrift never lacks the means of spending, is by no means true and can be but little confided in,—on the contrary we are certain that he who will not live a regular life according to his degree, shall finally live in want and die miserably;—yet, it may sometimes be remarked that fortune seems rather to aid those who squander without restraint, than those who are careful and self-denying in all things; or, if the favours of fortune are withdrawn, death is frequently observed to make up for her inconstancy, and to bring a remedy for the misgovernment of the man himself, by intervening exactly at that moment when the spendthrift begins to discover, to his infinite misery, what it is to want that in age which he has squandered in youth: labouring and living wretchedly when he should be reposing and at his ease. Such would have been the lot of Giovanni da San Stefano a Ponte, of Florence, if, after he had consumed his patrimony, wasted the large gains which fortune, rather than his merits, threw into his hands, and exhausted other possessions reverting to him unexpectedly from various sources, he had not attained the end of his life at the moment when the last portion of his property was expended. Giovanni dal Ponte was a scholar of Buffalmacco, whom he imitated rather in his attachment to the pleasures of life, than in the effort to become a good painter. Born in 1307, and entered early as a disciple of Buffalmacco, the first works of Giovanni were executed in fresco, for the capitular church of Empoli. They were in the chapel of San Lorenzo, where he depicted certain stories from the life of the saint with so much success, that as a more satisfactory progress was anticipated from so creditable a commencement, he was invited to Arezzo in the year 1344, where he painted an assumption of the Virgin in one of the chapels of the church of San Francesco; and no long time afterwards, being in some credit in that city, on account of