Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 3.djvu/160

152 designs of several houses, but more particularly that for the palace of Messer Bernardino Caffarelli. In the Valle also, he executed one of the interior façades, preparing the design moreover for the stables and upper garden, built by Andrea, Cardinal della Valle. In this work the divisions are formed by columns, with bases and capitals after the antique; and around the whole, by wayj of basement, Lorenzo arranged antique piers covered with sculptures: above these, but beneath certain large niches, to be further noticed hereafter, the artist constructed another frieze, consisting of fragments from the antique, and within the niches he placed marble statues, also spoils from the antique. Now these last were by no means entire, some being without heads, others without arms, and some had no legs; every one, in short, was mutilated in some respect, but Lorenzo arranged the whole work extremely well nevertheless, having caused all that was wanting to be supplied by good sculptors. This work gave occasion to the same thing being done by many nobles, who also caused fragments of antiquity to be restored; the Cardinals Cesis, Ferrara, and Farnese, for example, or, to say the whole in one word, all Rome. And of a truth, these antiquities thus restored, have certainly a much more graceful effect than have those mutilated trunks, those members without a head, or other figures, defective and maimed in their different parts.

But to return to the garden above-named. Over the before mentioned niches was placed as we now see it, the frieze of antique sculptures in mezzo-rilievo, of most rare and exquisite beauty, and this mode of proceeding, which was an invention of Lorenzo^s, became a source of great advantage to that artist; for when the troubles of Clement VII. had somewhat passed by, he was much employed by that pontiff, to his great honour as well as profit. And that happened on this wise: when the Castello Sant’ Angelo had been attacked. Pope Clement had remarked that two small marble chapels near the entrance to the bridge had caused him great loss, seeing that certain musketeers who had taken possession of them, had found means, thus sheltered^ to shoot down all who permitted themselves to be seen on the walls of Sant’ Angelo; they thus destroyed the defences of the Castello, while they remained themselves secure from all injury. His Holiness