ination,
that Jacopo, growing to love him more and more every day, began to
encourage him and to bring him forward by making him execute now one
thing and now another. Whereupon, although Sansovino had in his
workshop at that time Solosmeo da Settignano and Pippo del Fabro,
young men of great promise, seeing that Tribolo, having added skill in
the use of chisels to his good knowledge of working in clay and in
wax, not only equalled them but surpassed them by a great measure, he
began to make much use of him in his works. And after finishing the
Apostle and a Bacchus that he made for the house of Giovanni Bartolini
in Gualfonda, and undertaking to make for M. Giovanni Gaddi, his
intimate friend, a chimney-piece and a water-basin of hard sandstone
for his house on the Piazza di Madonna, he caused some large figures
of boys in clay, which were to go above the great cornice, to be made
by Tribolo, who executed them so extraordinarily well, that M.
Giovanni, having seen the beautiful manner and the genius of the young
man, commissioned him to execute two medallions of marble, which,
finished with great excellence, were afterwards placed over certain
doors in the same house.

Meanwhile there was a commission to be given for a tomb, a work of great
magnitude, for the King of Portugal; and since Jacopo had been the
disciple of Andrea Contucci of Monte Sansovino, and had the reputation
not only of having equalled his master, a man of great renown, but of
having a manner even more beautiful, that work, through the good offices
of the Bartolini, was allotted to him. Whereupon Jacopo made a most
superb model of wood, all covered with scenes and figures of wax, which
were executed for the most part by Tribolo; and these proving to be very
beautiful, the young man's fame so increased that Matteo di Lorenzo
Strozzi--Tribolo having now left Sansovino, thinking that he was by that
time able to work by himself--commissioned him to make some children of
stone, and shortly afterwards, being much pleased with them, two of
marble that are holding a dolphin which pours water into a fish-pond, a
work that is now to be seen at San Casciano, a place eight miles distant
from Florence, in the villa of that M. Matteo.

While these works were being executed by Tribolo in Florence, M.
Bartolommeo Barbazzi, a Bolognese gentleman who had gone there on some
business, remembered that a search was being made in Bologna for a
young man who could work wel