hich he left in his
monastery, the writing in which is most beautiful, the books
themselves being perhaps the largest in Italy, but an endless number
of other books which may still be found in Rome and in Venice and
many other places, notably in S. Michele and S. Mania at Murano, a
monastery of the Camaldoline order. By these works the good father
has richly deserved the honours accorded to him many years after he
had passed to a better life, his celebration in many Latin verses by
D. Paolo Orlandini, a very learned monk of the same monastery, as
well as the preservation of the right hand which wrote the books,
with great veneration in a tabernacle, together with that of another
monk, D. Silvestro, who illuminated the same books with no less
excellence, when the conditions of the time are taken into
consideration, than D. Jacopo had written them. I, who have seen them
many times, am lost in astonishment that they should have been
executed with such good design and with so much diligence at that
time, when all the arts of design were little better than lost, since
the works of these monks were executed about the year of grace 1350,
or a little before or after, as may be seen in each of the said
books. It is reported, and some old men relate that when Pope Leo X.
came to Florence he wished to see and closely examine these books,
since he remembered having heard them highly praised by the
Magnificent Lorenzo de' Medici, his father; and that after he had
attentively looked through them and admired them as they were all
lying open on the choir-desks, he said, "If they were in accordance
with the rules of the Roman Church and not of the Camaldolines, I
should like some specimens for S. Peter's at Rome, for which I would
pay the monks a just price." There were, and perhaps still are, two
very fine ones at S. Peter's by the same monks. In the same monastery
of the Angeli is a quantity of very ancient embroidery, done in a
very fine style, with excellent designs by the fathers of the house
while they were in perpetual seclusion, with the title not of monks
but of hermits, and who never came out of the monastery as the nuns
and monks do in our day. This practice of seclusion lasted until
1470. But to return to D. Lorenzo. He taught Francesco Fiorentino,
who, after his death, did the tabernacle which is on the side of S.
Maria Novella at the head of the via della Scala leading to the
Pope's chamber. He also had another pupil, a P