ry good and very worthy monk, so was he a better writer of large
letters than any who lived either before or after him, not only in
Tuscany, but in all Europe, as it is clearly proved not only by the
twenty very large volumes of choral books that he left in his monastery,
which are the most beautiful, as regards the writing, as well as the
largest that there are perchance in Italy, but also by an infinity of
others which are to be found in Rome, in Venice, and in many other
places, and above all in S. Michele and in S. Mattia di Murano, a
monastery of his Order of Camaldoli; for which works this good father
well deserved, very many years after he had passed to a better life, not
only that Don Paolo Orlandini, a very learned monk of the same
monastery, should celebrate him with many Latin verses, but that his
right hand, wherewith he wrote the said books, should be preserved with
much veneration in a shrine, as it still is, together with that of
another monk called Don Silvestro, who, according to the standard of
those times, illuminated the said books no less excellently than Don
Jacopo had written them. And I, who have seen them many times, remain in
a marvel that they were executed with so much design and with so much
diligence in those times, when the arts of design were little less than
lost; for the works of these monks date about the year of our salvation
1350, more or less, as it may be seen in each of the said books. It is
said, and some old men still remember it, that when Pope Leo X came to
Florence he wished to see the said books and examine them carefully,
remembering that he had heard them much praised to Lorenzo de' Medici
the Magnificent, his father; and that after he had looked at them with
attention and admiration, as they all lay open on the desks of the
choir, he said, "If they were according to the Roman Church, and not,
as they are, according to the monastic use and ordering of Camaldoli, we
would be pleased to take some volumes of them for S. Pietro in Rome,
giving just recompense to the monks"; in which church there were
formerly, and perhaps there still are, two others of them by the hand of
the same monks, both very beautiful. In the same Monastery of the Angeli
there are many ancient embroideries, wrought with very beautiful manner
and with much design by the ancient fathers of that place, while they
were living in perpetual enclosure under the name not of monks but of
hermits, without ever issui