Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/245

Rh painted certain stories from the life of St. Louis, in the, also in fresco and in the same church, he acquitted himself much more creditably. Agnolo Gaddi, then, was an artist who worked capriciously, sometimes with more care, and sometimes with less: thus in Santo Spirito, also in Florence, he painted a Virgin with the Child in her arms, in fresco, within the door which leads from the piazza into the convent, and over a second door of the building, she is accompanied by Sant’ Agostino and San Niccolo, and this work is so admirably executed, that one might fancy the figures painted yesterday. The secret of mosaic had been in a certain manner bequeathed as an inheritance to Agnolo, and he had in his possession all the instruments and other matters needful to the prosecution of that art, and which had been used by Gaddo, his grandfather. Agnolo, therefore, by way of pastime, and because the materials lay thus to his hand, rather than for any other reason, gave a certain degree of attention to mosaic, and when the fancy took him he executed different works in that branch of art. When it was found, then, that many of the slabs of marble which cover the eight sides of the roof of San Giovanni had been injured by time, and that the damp, penetrating to the mosaics formerly placed there by Andrea Tafi, was doing them grievous mischief, the consuls of the guild of merchants resolved to reconstruct the greater part of the roof, that the rest might not be ruined, and to have the mosaic also restored; whereupon they confided the direction of the whole work to Agnolo Gaddi, who commenced it in the year 1346. He first covered the roof with new slabs of marble, which he laid over each other, to the breadth of two fingers; then, cutting each to the half of its thickness, he fastened them into each other with a cement formed of mastic and wax melted together, all which he completed with so much care, that neither roof nor ceiling has suffered the least injury from the rains, from that day to the present time;