ardo Cungi and Durante del
Nero, both of Borgo San Sepolcro, who executed the apartments of the
first floor. At the head of the staircase, which was made in a spiral
shape, the first room was painted by Santi Titi, a painter of Florence,
who acquitted himself very well; the larger room, which is beside the
first, was painted by the above-named Federigo Zucchero, the brother of
Taddeo; and the Sclavonian Giovanni dal Carso, a passing good master of
grotesques, executed another room beyond it. But, although each of the
men named above acquitted himself very well, nevertheless Federigo
surpassed all the others in some stories of Christ that he painted
there, such as the Transfiguration, the Marriage of Cana in Galilee, and
the Centurion kneeling before Christ. And of two that were still
wanting, one was painted by Orazio Sammacchini, a Bolognese painter, and
the other by a certain Lorenzo Costa of Mantua. The same Federigo
Zucchero painted in that place the little loggia that looks out over the
fish-pond. And then he painted a frieze in the principal hall of the
Belvedere (to which one ascends by the spiral staircase), with stories
of Moses and Pharaoh, beautiful to a marvel; the design for which work,
drawn and coloured with his own hand in a most beautiful drawing,
Federigo himself gave not long since to the Reverend Don Vincenzio
Borghini, who holds it very dear as a drawing by the hand of an
excellent painter. In the same place, also, Federigo painted the Angel
slaying the first-born in Egypt, availing himself, in order to finish it
the quicker, of the help of many of his young men. But when those works
came to be valued by certain persons, the labours of Federigo and the
others were not rewarded as they should have been, because there are
among our craftsmen in Rome, as well as in Florence and everywhere else,
some most malignant spirits who, blinded by prejudice and envy, are not
able or not willing to recognize the merits of the works of others and
the deficiency of their own; and such persons are very often the reason
that the young men of fine genius, becoming dismayed, grow cold in their
studies and their work. After these works, Federigo painted in the
Office of the Ruota, about an escutcheon of Pope Pius IV, two figures
larger than life, Justice and Equity, which were much extolled; thus
giving time to Taddeo, meanwhile, to attend to the work of Caprarola and
the chapel in S. Marcello.

In the meantime his Holi