Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 4.djvu/422

414 to make delays in Sicily, they did not reach Malta until the 11th of March, when they were most joyfully received there by the Grand Master.

Being thereupon informed of what he was desired to do, Bartolommeo Genga acquitted himself so well in respect to those fortifications, that words could not do adequate justice to his success, insomuch that to the Grand Master and all those Signori the Knights, it appeared that they had found another Archimedes; of this they offered ample testimony in the rich presents which they made him, and by holding him in the utmost veneration as a most remarkable and extraordinary person. Bartolommeo meanwhile prepared the model for a city, with designs for several churches, and for the palace and residence of the above-mentioned Grand Master, in all which he displayed admirable powers of invention, and profound knowledge of his vocation. But having done thus much he was seized with his last illness, and the matter fell out on this wise. The heats in those islands being insupportably violent, Bartolommeo had placed himself between two doors, one day in the month of July, in the hope of finding a fresher air; but he had not been long there before he was taken with insufferable pains of the body, accompanied by a fearful dysentery, and in seventeen days these destroyed his life, to the infinite grief of the Grand Master and of all those most honourable and most valiant knights, who, just as they had believed themselves to have found a man after their own hearts, were deprived of him by death.

When the sorrowful intelligence was conveyed to the Signor Duke of Urbino, he was struck with indescribable sorrow, and bewailed the loss of the poor Genga most bitterly; he then determined to prove the love which he had borne to him by his bounties to the five children whom Bartolommeo had left behind, and all of whom he took into his particular and most affectionate care.

Among the gifts of Bartolommeo Genga was that of much skill in the invention of maskings, and in preparing the scenic decorations for dramatic spectacles he was most excellent. He delighted in making sonnets, and in other compositions, whether in verse or prose, and in the ottava-rima there was none who could do better than himself, that being