Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 5.djvu/520

508 than myself concerning such things as I did not know, wherefore I was afterwards assisted, both in works and counsels, by Tribolo, Bandinello, and others.

In a picture some three braccia high then, I portrayed about this time the Duke Alessandro, armed and taken from the life; the arrangement adopted for this work was in some respects peculiar; the Duke’s seat, for example, was formed of captives chained together, and there were other phantasies. I remember also that, to say nothing of the resemblance of the countenance, which is a faithful one, I desired to reproduce the burnished gloss and peculiar gleaming of the clear, bright, shining arms, and was fairly in danger of losing my wits in that matter, so desperate were my struggles to produce the desired effects, and so painfully did I copy every the smallest minutia from the objects themselves. But, despairing of a satisfactory approach to the truth, I took Jacopo da Pontormo, whose abilities I greatly respected, to see the work, when, having examined the same, and perceiving my discouragement as well as the earnest zeal of my labours, he said to me kindly, “My son, so long as these lustrous arms ' shall stand in all their glitter beside this picture, the work will appear to thee a mere thing painted, seeing that although the hiacco is the most potent light and lustre that can be used by Art, yet is the steel itself inevitably more bright and lustrous than the hiacco. Take away these weapons then,4and thou shalt see that thy feigned arms are not so bad a work as thou art supposing them to be.” When the picture was ultimately completed I gave it to the Duke, who presented the same to Messer Ottaviano de’ Medici, and in his palace it remains to the present day, in company with the Portrait of Catherine, the sister of Duke Alessandro, then a girl, but afterwards Queen of Prance, and that of the Magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici the Elder. In the same Palace are three other pictures, executed in youth by my hand: Abraham about to Sacrifice Isaac, Our Saviour Christ in the Garden, and the Last Supper of Our Lord with his Apostles.

Meanwhile the Cardinal Ippolito, in whom all my best hopes were placed, being dead, I began to understand that