ne of
those chapels, one representing the Active Life, and the other the
Contemplative, which were despatched with a very sure facility of hand,
in the manner wherein he executed works to which he gave little study;
and while Taddeo was painting those figures, Federigo painted three
little stories of S. Paul in the recess of the same chapel. At the end
of which, both having fallen ill, they went away, promising to return in
September. Taddeo returned to Rome, and Federigo to Sant'Agnolo with a
slight fever; which having passed, at the end of two months he also
returned to Rome. There, Holy Week being close at hand, the two together
set to work in the Florentine Company of S. Agata, which is behind the
Banchi, and painted in four days on the vaulting and the recess of that
oratory, for a rich festival that was prepared for Holy Thursday and
Good Friday, scenes in chiaroscuro of the whole Passion of Christ, with
some Prophets and other pictures, which caused all who saw them to
marvel.

After that, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, having brought very near
completion his Palace of Caprarola, with Vignuola as architect, of whom
there will be an account in a short time, gave the charge of painting it
all to Taddeo, on these conditions: that, since Taddeo did not wish to
abandon his other works in Rome, he should be obliged to make all the
cartoons, designs, divisions, and arrangements for the works in painting
and in stucco that were to be executed in that place; that the men who
were to carry them into execution should be chosen by Taddeo, but paid
by the Cardinal; and that Taddeo should be obliged to work there himself
for two or three months in the year, and to go there as many times as it
might be necessary to see how things were progressing, and to retouch
all that was not to his satisfaction. And for all these labours the
Cardinal promised him a salary of two hundred crowns a year. Whereupon
Taddeo, having so honourable an appointment and the support of so great
a lord, determined that he would give himself some peace of mind, and
would no longer accept any mean work in Rome, as he had done up to that
time; desiring, above all, to avoid the censure that many men of art
laid upon him, saying that from a certain grasping avarice he would
accept any kind of work, in order to gain with the arms of others that
which would have been to many of them an honest means to enable them to
study, as he himself had done in his early yout