Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 5.djvu/135

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In the year 1527, when the Medici were expelled from the city of Florence and there was much fighting in defence of the Palace of the Signoria, a large bench or form being cast down from on high, with intent that it should fall on those who were attacking the door, it chanced, as Fortune would have it, that the missile fell upon the arm of the David, in marble, by Buonarroti, which is on the platform, and the arm was thereby broken into three pieces. These fragments having been thus suffered to remain lying on the earth for three days without having been lifted up by any man, Francesco repaired to the Ponte Vecchio to seek Vasari, and having imparted his purpose to him, the two boys, children as they were, advanced into the Piazza, without thinking of the dangers to which they thus exposed themselves, and from the midst of the soldiers on guard they gathered up the three pieces of that arm, and carried them into the house of Michelagnolo the father of Francesco, in the lane beside the dwelling of Messer Bivigliano. From this place it was that the Duke Cosimo, in course of time, regained those fragments which he then had fastened to the statue by means of copper nails.

The House of Medici being thus in exile, and with them the above-named Cardinal of Cortona, Antonio Vasari took his son back to Arezzo, and this to the no small regret of Francesco and himself, who loved each other like brothers. They were, however, not separated long; seeing that the plague, which broke out in the following August, caused the death of the father of Giorgio with that of all the rest of his house, when Vasari was so earnestly pressed to return to Florence, by the letters of Francesco, who had himself been on the point of dying in the pestilence, that the said Giorgio finally agreed to do so. There, for the space of two years, impelled by their necessities and by the desire of improvement, they laboured with indescribable zeal and industry, insomuch that they both made very remarkable progress; taking refuge meanwhile, as did also the above-named Nannoccio da San Giorgio, in the workshops of the painter Raffaello del Brescia, where Francesco executed numerous small