Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 3.djvu/485

Rh designs of other artists, or of carvings made by the masters of antiquity.

For Pope Clement VII. Valerio executed a casket entirely of crystals, and this he completed in so masterly a manner that he received two thousand scudi of gold from the pontiff for its workmanship. All the Passion of our Saviour Christ was engraved on those crystals by Valerio, but with the designs of others; the casket was ultimately presented by Pope Clement to the King Francis at Marseilles, at the time when his niece was sent thither on her marriage with the Duke of Orleans, afterwards King Henry. For the same Pontiff Valerio made several beautiful pattens, with a cross of crystal, which was indeed divine. He prepared dies for medals also, with the portrait of Clement on the one side and beautiful compositions on the reverse. Valerio gave so powerful an impulse to his peculiar branch of art, and caused so large an increase in the masters exercising the same, that before the sack of Rome the number of the latter, not there only but in Milan and other places, was almost incredibly great.

The medals of the twelve Cassars, with reverses after the