ght colour, and in the other that with the dark. But the best
joke of all was that he had his leather belt hung all round with little
pots full of tempered colours, so that he looked like the Devil of S.
Macario with all those flasks of his; and when he worked with his
spectacles on his nose, he would have made the very stones laugh, and
particularly when he began to chatter, for then he babbled enough for
twenty, saying the strangest things in the world, and his whole
demeanour was a comedy. Certain it is that he never used to speak well
of any person, however able or good, and however well dowered he saw him
to be by Nature or Fortune. And, as has been said, he so loved to
chatter and tell stories, that one evening, at the hour of the Ave
Maria, when a painter of Bologna, after buying cabbages in the Piazza,
came upon Amico, the latter kept him under the Loggia del Podesta with
his talk and his amusing stories, without the poor man being able to
break away from him, almost till daylight, when Amico said: "Now go and
boil your cabbages, for the time is getting on."

He was the author of a vast number of other jokes and follies, of which
I shall not make mention, because it is now time to say something of
Girolamo da Cotignola. This master painted many pictures and portraits
from life in Bologna, and among them are two in the house of the
Vinacci, which are very beautiful. He made a portrait after death of
Monsignore de Foix, who died in the rout of Ravenna, and not long after
he executed a portrait of Massimiliano Sforza. For S. Giuseppe he
painted a panel-picture which brought him much praise, and, for S.
Michele in Bosco, the panel-picture in oils which is in the Chapel of S.
Benedetto. The latter work led to his executing, in company with Biagio
Bolognese, all the scenes which are round that church, laid on in fresco
and executed "a secco," wherein are seen proofs of no little mastery, as
has been said in speaking of the manner of Biagio. The same Girolamo
painted a large altar-piece for S. Colomba at Rimini, in competition
with Benedetto da Ferrara and Lattanzio, in which work he made a S.
Lucia rather wanton than beautiful. And in the great tribune of that
church he executed a Coronation of Our Lady, with the twelve Apostles
and the four Evangelists, with heads so gross and hideous that they are
an outrage to the eye.

He then returned to Bologna, but had not been there long when he went to
Rome, where he made po