road festoons that were to run in
clusters round the windows, Vasari made one with his own hand, keeping
real fruits in front of him, that he might copy them from nature. This
done, he ordained that Cristofano and Stefano should go on with the
rest, holding to the same design, one on one side of the window, and
the other on the other side, and should thus, one by one, proceed to
finish them all; promising to him who might prove at the end of the
work to have acquitted himself best a pair of scarlet hose. And so,
competing lovingly for both honour and profit, they set themselves to
copy everything, from the large things down to the most minute, such
as millet-seed, hemp-seed, bunches of fennel, and the like, in such a
manner that those festoons proved to be very beautiful; and both of
them received from Vasari the prize of the scarlet hose.

Giorgio took great pains to persuade Cristofano to execute by himself
part of the designs for the scenes that were to go into the frieze,
but he would never do it. Wherefore, the while that Giorgio was
drawing them himself, Gherardi executed the buildings in two of the
panel-pictures, with much grace and beauty of manner, and such
perfection, that a master of great judgment, even if he had had the
cartoons before him, could not have done what Cristofano did. And, in
truth, there never was a painter who could do by himself, and without
study, the things that he contrived to do. After having finished the
execution of the buildings in the two panel-pictures, the while that
Vasari was carrying to completion the twenty stories from the
Apocalypse for the above-mentioned frieze, Cristofano, taking in hand
the panel-picture in which S. Gregory (whose head is a portrait of
Pope Clement VII) is eating with his twelve poor men, executed the
whole service of the table, all very lifelike and most natural. Then,
a beginning having been made with the third panel-picture, while
Stefano was occupied with the gilding of the ornamental frames of the
other two, a staging was erected upon two trestles of wood, from
which, while Vasari was painting on one side, in a glory of sunlight,
the three Angels that appeared to Abraham in the Valley of Mamre,
Cristofano painted some buildings on the other side. But he was always
making some contraption with stools and tables, and at times with
basins and pans upside down, on which he would climb, like the casual
creature that he was; and once it happened that, see