Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 4.djvu/345

Rh are now about to write, derive their origin, according to the assertions of certain authorities, from Ancisa, a fortified place in the Upper Val d’Arno, and which is of some celebrity from having been the birth-place of Messer Francesco Petrarca. But whether it were from that place or from some other that his forefathers came, the above-named Bartolommeo, who was a Florentine, and as I have been told, of the family of the Carucci, is reported to have been a disciple of Domenico Ghirlandajo, and being a painter of tolerably good repute in those times, he is affirmed to have executed numerous works in the Val d’ Arno.

Having been summoned to Empoli therefore, on a certain occasion, and being there employed in the execution of different works, he took up his abode for some time in that place and its neighbourhood, eventually choosing a wife from Puntormo, Alessandra namely, a virtuous and well-born maiden, the daughter of Pasquale di Zanobi and of Mona Brigida his wife.

To this Bartolommeo, then, there was born in the year 1493, a son, whom he called Jacopo, but the father dying in 1499, the mother in 1504, and the grandfather in 1506, the child was left to the care of Mona Brigida, his grandmother.

With her he resided accordingly for some years at Puntormo, where she caused him to be taught reading, writing, and the first principles of the Latin grammar; but at the age of thirteen, his grandmother took him to Florence, where she placed him under the care of the Court of Minors, to the end that his small property might be managed and preserved by that magistracy, as is the custom. The boy himself Mona Brigida placed in the house of a certain Battista, a cordwainer, who was some sort of distant connection of his family, and having done that she returned to Puntormo, taking with her a sister of Jacopo’s.

But no long time had elapsed before Mona Brigida herself also died, when Jacopo was compelled to take his sister to himself, and accordingly found an abode for her in the house of one of his relations called Niccolaio, who dwelt at Florence in the Via de’ Servi. But even this maiden did