him that he should return to his own
country to execute some important work with his own hand. Having
received these letters, the Frate, remembering that Messer Pier
Francesco Riccio, after having been mad many years, had died, and that
Bandinelli also had left the world, which men had seemed to be little
his friends, wrote back that he would not fail to return as soon as he
might be able, in order to serve his most illustrious Excellency, and to
execute under his protection not profane things, but some sacred work,
since he had a mind wholly turned to the service of God and of His
Saints.

Finally, then, having returned to Florence in the year 1561, he went off
with Maestro Zaccheria to Pisa, where the Lord Duke and the Cardinal
were, to do reverence to their most illustrious lordships; and after he
had been received with much kindness and favour by those lords, and
informed by the Duke that after his return to Florence he would be given
a work of importance to execute, he went back. Then, having obtained
leave from his fellow-friars of the Nunziata by means of Maestro
Zaccheria, he erected in the centre of the chapter-house of that
convent, where many years before he had made the Moses and S. Paul of
stucco, as has been related above, a very beautiful tomb for himself and
for all such men of the arts of design, painters, sculptors, and
architects, as had not a place of their own in which to be buried;
intending to arrange by a contract, as he did, that those friars, in
return for the property that he was to leave to them, should be obliged
to say Mass on some feast-days and ordinary days in that chapter-house,
and that every year, on the day of the most Holy Trinity, a solemn
festival should be held there, and on the following day an office of the
dead for the souls of those buried in that place.

This design having then been imparted by Fra Giovanni Agnolo and Maestro
Zaccheria to Giorgio Vasari, who was very much their friend, they
discoursed together on the affairs of the Company of Design, which had
been created in the time of Giotto, and had a home in S. Maria Nuova in
Florence, which it had possessed from that time down to our own, as may
still be seen at the present day from a record at the high-altar of that
Hospital; and they thought with this occasion to revive it and set it up
again. For that Company had been removed from the above-mentioned
high-altar, as has been related in the Life of Jacopo di Casentin