Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 4.djvu/461

Rh rich, by procuring for them the favour of great men, and if in their youth they would labour to bring their merits and deserts into harmony with their good fortune, how marvellous would then be the effects that might be seen to result from their activity. But the contrary is known to be too often the case; for as it is true that he who confides his destiny solely to fortune, is for the most part deceived, so is it also most evident and daily proved by experience that even good ability will not accomplish any great things, if wholly left to itself and not accompanied by good fortune. If Giovan Antonio of Verzelli had displayed excellence equal to his good fortune, as he might have done had he laboured to that effect, he would not have found himself miserably reduced at the end of his life, which was always an eccentric and illgoverned one, to an old age marred by deplorable want.

Giovan Antonio was invited to Siena by certain merchants, who were agents of the noble family of the Spannocchi, when, as his good fortune, or perhaps his evil destiny, would have it, he did not for a time find any competitors in that city. He therefore laboured there alone, and this, although it was for the moment a kind of advantage, became eventually injurious to him, since he thus suffered himself in a certain manner to fall asleep, and never gave himself the trouble to study, but executed the greater part of his works by mere facility of hand, or if at times he did resolve to betake himself to some little study, these efforts were principally confined to copying and imitating the works of Jacopo della Fonte, which were much admired in Siena, beyond this he did but little.

In the early days of his residence at Siena, Giovan-