Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 3.djvu/305

Rh him that art is indebted for the facility wherewith painters now execute that part of their works.

Many apartments and friezes in the various dwellings of Rome were adorned by these artists with coloured fresco paintings and works in tempera, but these things were for the most part done as trials only, seeing that they could never attain to the high degree of perfection in colours which they constantly exhibited in chiaro-scuro, in works imitating bronze, or in terretta. A proof of what is here affirmed may still be seen in the palace which formerly belonged to the Cardinal da Torre-Sanguigna at Volterra, on the front of which these artists painted a decoration in chiaro-scuro, which is exceedingly beautiful, while certain figures painted in colours at the same place are so badly done, that even the excellence of design for which they are generally remarkable is not to be perceived in these figures; and this is rendered all the more evident by the fiict that close beside them is an Escutcheon of Pope Leo, with nude figures by Giovanni Francesco Vetraio, who would certainly have distinguished himself very highly, had he not been removed by death in the midst of his career.

Polidoro and Maturino were, nevertheless, not thereby cured of their ill-placed confidence in their own ability to execute such works, and undertook certain figures of Children in colours for the altar of the Martelli family, in the church of Sant’ Agostino, in Rome, where Jacopo Sansovino erected a Madonna in marble, as the completion of the fabric; but these Children could never be supposed to be the wOrk of illustrious artists; on the contrary, they have all the appearance of having been painted by persons utterly incapable, and but just beginning to acquire the rudiments of their art. On the side where the altar is in part concealed by the altar-cloth, Polidoro executed a small figure representing our Saviour lying dead with the Maries around the body, which is, on the contrary, exceedingly beautiful * and serves to show that the manner therein adopted, and not the use of colours, was in fact the true vocation of those masters.

Having returned to their accustomed work therefore, our artists decorated two fa9ades on the Campo Martio, both of