writer, from whom,
in return for a little portrait or some other similar courtesy in the
way of art, they gain on occasion the reward of eternal honour and name,
by means of their writings; and this, among those who practise the arts
of design, should be particularly desired and sought by the excellent
painters, seeing that their works, being on the surface and on a ground
of colour, cannot have that eternal life which castings in bronze and
works in marble give to sculpture, or buildings to the architects.

Very great, then, was that good-fortune of Simone, to live at the time
of Messer Francesco Petrarca and to chance to find that most amorous
poet at the Court of Avignon, desirous of having the image of Madonna
Laura by the hand of Maestro Simone, because, having received it as
beautiful as he had desired, he made memory of him in two sonnets,
whereof one begins:

Per mirar Policleto a prova fiso
Con gli altri che ebber fama di quell'arte;

and the second:

Quando giunse a Simon l'alto concetto
Ch'a mio nome gli pose in man lo stile.

These sonnets, in truth, together with the mention made of him in one of
his _Familiar Letters_, in the fifth book, which begins: "Non sum
nescius," have given more fame to the poor life of Maestro Simone than
all his own works have ever done or ever will, seeing that they must at
some time perish, whereas the writings of so great a man will live for
eternal ages. Simone Memmi of Siena, then, was an excellent painter,
remarkable in his own times and much esteemed at the Court of the Pope,
for the reason that after the death of Giotto his master, whom he had
followed to Rome when he made the Navicella in mosaic and the other
works, he made a Virgin Mary in the portico of S. Pietro, with a S.
Peter and a S. Paul, near to the place where the bronze pine-cone is, on
a wall between the arches of the portico on the outer side; and in this
he counterfeited the manner of Giotto very well, receiving so much
praise, above all because he portrayed therein a sacristan of S. Pietro
lighting some lamps before the said figures with much promptness, that
he was summoned with very great insistence to the Court of the Pope at
Avignon, where he wrought so many pictures, in fresco and on panels,
that he made his works correspond to the reputation that had been borne
thither. Whence, having returned to Siena in great credit and much
favoured on this account, he was commissioned by