Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/471

Rh reflects on the grandeur of this work, will be amazed that the mind of Filippo was capable of conceiving a building so vast and so truly magnificent, not only in its external form, but also in the distribution of all its apartments. Of the views from this palace, which are most beautiful, I say nothing, nor yet of the pleasant hills which form almost an amphitheatre around the edifice, in the direction of the city walls, because it would occupy me too long, as I have said, to describe these things in full, nor could any one who has not seen it, imagine how greatly this palace is superior to every other royal edifice.

It is said that the machinery for the “paradise” of San Felice in Piazza, in the same city, was invented by Filippo for the festival of the Annunciation, which was solemnized by a Representation, in the manner customary in old times among the Florentines. This was without doubt a most extraordinary thing, giving proof of great ability and industry in him who was the inventor, since there was the spectacle of a heaven full of living figures moving about on high, with an infinity of lights, which appeared and disappeared almost as does the lightning. All who could have described these things from their own knowledge are now dead, and the machinery itself is destroyed without a hope that it can ever be reconstructed, seeing that the place is no longer inhabited as of old by the monks of Camaldoli, but by the nuns of San Pier Martire; and also because the monastery of the Carmine suffered considerable injury from that machinery, which pulled down the timbers of the roof. I will therefore not refuse the labour of describing it exactly as it was. Filippo, then, for the purposes of this representation, had suspended between two of the beams which support the roof, the half of a globe, resembling an empty bowl, or rather the basin used by barbers, with the edge downwards; this half-globe was formed of light and thin planks, secured to an iron star, passing round the outer circle; they were narrowed towards the centre, the whole being held in equilibrium by a large ring of the so-call''Ed. Flor.''ntine manner, which gives to domestic architecture the grave, fortress like aspect, most proper to express the relation