Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 5.djvu/38

26 painted many years after by the Aretine, Giorgio Vasari, who was then a youth of eighteen, and working in the service of his first lord, the Duke Alessandro de' Medici. This was in the year 1535; and Giorgio there delineated stories from the Life of Julius Caesar in allusion to the Cardinal Julius, by whom the work had been commanded, as we have said. On a small vaulting of a coved form, near the above-mentioned Loggia, Giovanni then executed certain ornaments of stucco in very low relief, with several pictures of extraordinary merit, which greatly pleased the painters who were then in Florence, as giving evidence of much boldness and singular facility, while they were full of spirited and fanciful inventions; but being themselves accustomed to a laboured manner of their own and to a servile copying of exact portraits from the life, in everything that they did, the Florentine artists were not disposed to commend them unreservedly and without restriction, they not perfectly entering into the spirit of those productions. Nor did they set themselves to imitate the same, perhaps because they had not the boldness or courage to do so.

Having returned to Rome, Giovanni painted a series of large festoons around the angles and sections of a ceiling in the Loggia of Agostino Chigi, where Rafiaello had executed and was then continuing the decorations; Giovanni there represented fruits and flowers appropriate to every season of the year, each season following in regular succession, and the foliage, fruits, and flowers, being all finished to such perfection, that every separate object seen there, appears to be detached from the walls, and is indeed most natural. The variety of kind also in those fruits, grain, &c., is so wonderful, that I will not attempt to enumerate them one by one, and will only say that every sort which has ever been produced by Nature in our part of the world may there be found represented. Among the figures are those of a Mercury in the act of flight, and of a Priapus. Over the former is a gourd enveloped in its tendrils, with pumpkins amidst their flowers, and large bunches of figs, some bursting with their ripeness, and also mingled with flowers: all these fancies being expressed with so much grace, that no one could imagine anything more perfectly done. But what more can I say?—to sum up the whole, I may safely venture to affirm.