Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 2.djvu/245

Rh himself to the citizen, but as the latter made no observation on the circumstance, and began to praise the picture, he remained silent himself. Ultimately, the citizen took him home to his house and paid him the six florins, which the master had bargained for, wherewith Biagio returned to the bottega (workshop), where he arrived just as Sandro and Jacopo had taken off the pasteboard head-dresses, and saw his angels as veritable angels again, and no longer citizens in their caps. Altogether astonished at what he beheld, the disciple turned to his master and said, “Master mine, I know not whether I am dreaming, or whether the thing be really so, but when I came in just now, these angels had red caps on their heads, and now they have none! What may this mean?” Thou art out of thy wits, Blaise,” quoth Sandro, “this money hath made thy brain turn round; if the thing were as thou hast said, dost thou think this citizen would have bought thy picture?” “That is true,” replied Biagio, “and he certainly said nothing about it, but for all that it seems a very strange matter.” At last, all the other scholars getting round him, said so much that they made him believe the whole an imagination of his own.

A weaver of cloth once came to live close to Sandro, and this man erected full eight looms, which, when all were at work, not only caused an intolerable din with the trampling of the weavers and the clang of the shuttles, insomuch that poor Sandro was deafened with it, but likewise produced such a trembling and shaking throughout the house, which was none too solidly built, that the painter, what with one and the other, could no more continue his work, nor even remain in the house. He had frequently requested his neighbour to put an end to this disturbance, but the latter had replied, that he both could and would do what he pleased in his own house. Being angered by this, Sandro had an enormous mass of stone of great weight, and more than would fill a waggon, placed in exact equilibrium on the wall of his own dwelling, which was higher than that of his neighbour, and not a very strong one: this stone threatened to fall at the slightest shake given to the wall, when it must have crushed the roof, floors, frames, and workmen, of the weaver to atoms. The man, terrified at the danger, hastened to Sandro, from whom he received back his own reply