Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 5.djvu/451

Rh of the twelve Caesars, with others, all executed with infinite care.

Milan also had another sculptor called Tommaso Porta, but he died during the present year. This artist worked admirably well in marble, he imitated antique heads so perfectly that his productions in that kind have been sold for those of antiquity, and his masks have never been equalled. I have one of these last myself; it is in marble, and I have placed it in a chimney-piece of my house at Arezzo, where all men take it to be an antique. Tommaso likewise executed the heads of the twelve Caesars, of the size of life, and these, too, are singularly fine. Pope Julius III. took them, and kept them in his own apartments for many months as a work of great rarity. His Holiness then presented the artist with an office of a hundred crowns per annum, but the envy of Fra Gruglielmo, as it is thought, co-operating with that of others, caused the heads eventually to be sent back to the sculptor; they were, however, finally purchased at a good price by the merchants, who sent them into Spain. None of the copyists of the ancient works have surpassed Tommaso, and I have therefore thought him worthy of a memorial, the rather as he has departed to a better life, leaving behind him a very fair reputation for his ability and excellence.

The Florentine sculptor Nanni di Baccio Bigio, of whom we have spoken in other places, gave some hope of future distinction in his youth, and when the disciple of Raffaello da Montelupo, by the manner in which he executed certain small works in marble. Repairing to Rome with the sculptor Lorenzetto, he gave his attention to architecture as his father had done, but at the same time received the commission for a Statue of Pope Clement YIL, which is now' in the Choir of the Minerva, and for a Pieta in marble, copied from that of Michelagnolo. This last was placed in Santa Maria de’ Anima, the Church of the Germans, as a work of great merit, which it certainly is. No long time after having finished it, Nanni Bigio made another of similar kind for the Florentine merchant Luigi del Riccio, and this is now in a chapel belonging to that Luigi in the Church of San Spirito; nor was the merchant less extolled for his