did nothing but the ceiling of the
hall, which is passing rich in woodwork, with thirteen large pictures
wherein are the Celestial Gods, and in four angles the four Seasons of
the year nude, who are gazing at a great picture that is in the centre,
in which, with figures the size of life, is Excellence, who has Envy
under her feet and has seized Fortune by the hair, and is beating both
the one and the other; and a thing that was much commended at the time
was that as you go round the hall, Fortune being in the middle, from one
side Envy seems to be over Fortune and Excellence, and from another side
Excellence is over Envy and Fortune, as is seen often to happen in real
life. Around the walls are Abundance, Liberality, Wisdom, Prudence,
Labour, Honour, and other similar things, and below, all around, are
stories of ancient painters, Apelles, Zeuxis, Parrhasius, Protogenes,
and others, with various compartments and details that I omit for the
sake of brevity. In a chamber, also, in a great medallion in the ceiling
of carved woodwork, I painted Abraham, with God blessing his seed and
promising to multiply it infinitely; and in four squares that are around
that medallion, I painted Peace, Concord, Virtue, and Modesty. And since
I always adored the memory and the works of the ancients, and perceived
that the method of painting in distemper-colours was being abandoned,
there came to me a desire to revive that mode of painting, and I
executed the whole work in distemper; which method certainly does not
deserve to be wholly despised or abandoned. At the entrance of the
chamber, as it were in jest, I painted a bride who has in one hand a
rake, with which she seems to have raked up and carried away with her
from her father's house everything that she has been able, and in the
hand that is stretched in front of her, entering into the house of her
husband, she has a lighted torch, signifying that where she goes she
carries a fire that consumes and destroys everything.

While I was passing my time thus, the year 1548 having come, Don Giovan
Benedetto of Mantua, Abbot of SS. Fiore e Lucilla, a monastery of the
Black Friars of Monte Cassino, who took infinite delight in matters of
painting and was much my friend, prayed me that I should consent to
paint a Last Supper, or some such thing, at the head of their refectory.
Whereupon I resolved to gratify his wish, and began to think of doing
something out of the common use; and so I determ