Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 5.djvu/37

Rh

He subsequently constructed another fountain, but in the rustic manner, and having its site in the bed of a stream overhung with shrubs and plants. Here, with infinite skill and judgment, Giovanni caused the water to fall through tufa and other stones in drops and slender streams, which had all the appearance of being entirely natural. In the uppermost part of this grotto or cavern, and amidst the spungeous stones which formed it, he placed a colossal head of a Lion, around which the maidenhair and other climbing plants were so artfully trained as to form a kind of chaplet to the same, nor would it be easy to describe the grace thus imparted to that wild place, which was indeed most beautiful in every part, and inconceivably charming.

Having completed that undertaking, Giovanni received from the Cardinal the dignity of a knighthood of San Pietro, and was then sent to Florence, to the end that, having erected a certain chamber at that corner of the Medici Palace where Cosimo the elder, founder of the edifice, had made a Loggia for the assemblage and accommodation of the citizens, as it was formerly the custom of the most noble families to do, he might then paint and adorn the same with grottesche and ^stucco-work. Now the Loggia had been constructed after the designs of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, not open, but having the form of a chamber, and being furnished with two grated windows, which were the first of the kind that had been made for palaces, with the external grating of iron curving outwards that is to say. Of this Loggia, Giovanni now decorated all the vaulting with pictures and stucco-^work, exhibiting, in a circular* compartment thereof, the six balls, which are the arms of the Medici, and giving as supporters three boys in relief, the figures of which are singularly beautiful and graceful in their attitudes. Pie also represented numbers of admirably depicted animals in the same place, adding many fair devices of the Signori belonging to that illustrious house, with stories in mezzo-rilievo, made of stucco; there were besides compartments, wherein were delineated historical representations in white and black, after the mannef of cameos, and so well done that better could not possibly be imagined.

Pliere still remained four arches beneath the roof, which were not decorated with pictures at that time, but were