Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 4.djvu/73

Rh because he was too busily occupied with the interests and pleasures of the world. In the same manner he treated Messer Filippo of Siena, Clerk of the Chamber, for whom he commenced a story in oil on the wall, above the high altar of the church of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome, and never finished it at all, insomuch that the monks, when they had fallen quite into despair respecting it, were compelled to remove the scatfolding, which they found to encumber their church and impede the services, having no further resource but that of taking patience, and permitting the part to remain covered with a cloth, as it continued to be during all the remainder of Sebastiano’s life, but when he was dead, and the monks uncovered the picture so that what he had done could be seen, the portion that had been accomplished was acknowledged to be an exceedingly beautiful work. There are many female heads for example, in that painting (which shows Our Lady visiting Sant’ Elizabetta) that are singularly pleasing and display the most attractive grace, but here also there is evidence that this man performed all that he did with infinite difficulty and most laborious pains-taking, and that no part of his work was effected with that facility with which Nature and study will sometimes reward those who delight in their vocation and are perpetually occupied therewith.

A proof of what is here affirmed may be found in this same church of the Pace, and in the chapel of Agostino Chigi, where Raphael had painted the Sybils and the Prophets; for Sebastiano, in the hope of surpassing Raphael, undertook to paint something of his own in the niches beneath these sybils and prophets, proposing to execute his work on the stone, and covering it to that end with peperigno, the interstices being filled in with stucco under the action of fire, but he spent so much time in consideration of the matter that he