place, instead of
offering so manifest an affront to the memory of that good Cardinal.
Having thus so many works on his hands, Taddeo was every day urging
Federigo to return from Venice. That Federigo, after having finished the
chapel for the Patriarch, was negotiating to undertake to paint the
principal wall of the Great Hall of the Council, where Antonio Viniziano
had formerly painted; but the rivalry and the contentions that he
suffered from the Venetian painters were the reason that neither they,
with all their interest, nor he, likewise, obtained it.

Meanwhile Taddeo, having a desire to see Florence and the many works
which, so he heard, Duke Cosimo had carried out and was still carrying
out, and the beginning that his friend Giorgio Vasari was making in the
Great Hall; Taddeo, I say, pretending one day to go to Caprarola in
connection with the work that he was doing there, went off to Florence
for the Festival of S. John, in company with Tiberio Calcagni, a young
Florentine sculptor and architect. There, to say nothing of the city, he
found vast pleasure in the works of the many excellent sculptors and
painters, ancient as well as modern; and if he had not had so many
charges and so many works on his hands, he would gladly have stayed
there some months. Thus he saw the preparations of Vasari for the
above-named Hall--namely, forty-four great pictures, of four, six,
seven, or ten braccia each--in which he was executing figures for the
most part of six or eight braccia, with the assistance only of the
Fleming Giovanni Strada and Jacopo Zucchi, his disciples, and Battista
Naldini, in all which he took the greatest pleasure, and, hearing that
all had been executed in less than a year, it gave him great courage.
Wherefore, having returned to Rome, he set his hand to the above-named
chapel in the Trinita, with the resolve that he would surpass himself in
the stories of Our Lady that were to be painted there, as will be
related presently.

Now Federigo, although he was pressed to return from Venice, was not
able to refuse to stay in that city for the Carnival in company with the
architect Andrea Palladio. And Andrea, having made for the gentlemen of
the Company of the Calza a theatre in wood after the manner of a
Colosseum, in which a tragedy was to be performed, caused Federigo to
execute for the decoration of the same twelve large scenes, each seven
feet and a half square, with innumerable other stories of the action