Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 5.djvu/34

22 manner and witliout end? Displaying too, as they do, every tint of colour and change of form which Nature has imparted to them at every season of the year and in all the regions of the world. What again of the infinite assemblage of musical instruments which are also here represented in the most natural fashion? And who does not know,—seeing that the thing is most notorious—who does not know that at the end of the Loggia, where there was a building respecting which the Pope had not yet decided on the mode of completion —that Griovanni had painted a balustrade to imitate and continue the true one of the Loggia, with a hanging carpet over it, and that a groom one day, running in great haste to the Pope, who was then at the Belvedere, where a carpet was required for the use of his Holiness—a groom, I say, running towards this painted carpet from a distance, was about to snatch it from the balustrade, as believing it to be a real one?

At a word, it may truly be asserted, without offence to other artists, that for a work of this kind the paintings here in question are the most beautiful, the most extraordinary, and the most admirable, that have ever been seen by mortal eye. Nay, I will furthermore venture to declare, that this has been the cause why not Rome alone, but every other part of the world also, has been filled with these pictures. For not only was Giovanni more than the restorer, he may even be called the inventor, of stucco work and other grottesche; for by these his productions he has furnished a model from which all who have desired to labour in that branch of art have been able to take their exemplars, to say nothing of the fact, that the young men by whom Giovanni was assisted, and who were in great numbers, one time with another, having learned from him as the true master of that art, did afterwards disseminate their knowledge of the same throughout all the Provinces.

Giovanni was meanwhile proceeding with the lowermost part of the Loggia, wherein he adopted another and different method from that used in the compartments of stucco-work, the pictures on the walls and the vaultings of the firstmentioned Loggie; but these last were no less beautiful, the various divisions representing trellises of cane which supported vines richly covered and laden with grapes mingled with briony and other plants of various kinds, as also