Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 2.djvu/445

Rh useful, and magnificent an edifice, acknowledged by the masters of the profession to be the most perfect in that kind ever seen, should have failed to receive its due completion.

In the first cloister of San Pietro-a-Montorio, Bramante built a round temple constructed entirely of Travertine, than which nothing more perfectly conceived, more graceful, or more beautiful can be imagined, whether as regards arrangement, proportion, or variety: and if the erection of the entire cloister, which is not finished, had been completed after a design by our architect, which may still be seen, the effect of the whole would have been much more noble than it now is. In the Borgo this master gave the design of a palace, which Raphael of Urbino caused to be constructed of brick, with stucco-work cast in moulds, the columns and bosses are in the rustic manner, the order is Doric, the work altogether being a very fine one, and the invention of those castings at that time quite new. The design and arrangements for the decoration of Santa Maria at Loretto, which were afterwards continued by Andrea Sansovino, were also made by this master, who prepared the models for innumerable temples and palaces which are nov/ in Rome, and many other parts of the states of the church.

This admirable artist was of a most enterprising spirit, and among other projects had formed that of entirely restoring and even re-arrranging the palace of the Pope; nay, such was his boldness, seeing as he did the resolution with which the Pope accomplished important undertakings, and finding the desire