friezes in
terretta or in colours, with more design and grace than the men
before him had shown; wherefore it was a marvellous thing to see the
strange fancies that he expressed in painting. What is more, he
never executed a single work in which he did not avail himself with
great diligence of Roman antiquities, such as vases, buskins,
trophies, banners, helmet-crests, adornments of temples, ornamental
head-dresses, strange kinds of draperies, armour, scimitars, swords,
togas, mantles, and such a variety of other beautiful things, that
we owe him a very great and perpetual obligation, seeing that he
added beauty and adornment to art in this respect.

In his earliest youth he completed the Chapel of the Brancacci in
the Carmine at Florence, begun by Masolino, and left not wholly
finished by Masaccio on account of his death. Filippo, therefore,
gave it its final perfection with his own hand, and executed what
was lacking in one scene, wherein S. Peter and S. Paul are restoring
to life the nephew of the Emperor. In the nude figure of this boy he
portrayed the painter Francesco Granacci, then a youth; and he also
made portraits of the Chevalier, Messer Tommaso Soderini, Piero
Guicciardini, father of Messer Francesco the historian, Piero del
Pugliese, and the poet Luigi Pulci; likewise Antonio Pollaiuolo, and
himself as a youth, as he then was, which he never did again
throughout the whole of his life, so that it has not been possible
to find a portrait of him at a more mature age. In the scene
following this he portrayed Sandro Botticelli, his master, and many
other friends and people of importance; among others, the broker
Raggio, a man of great intelligence and wit, who executed in relief
on a conch the whole Inferno of Dante, with all the circles and
divisions of the pits and the nethermost well in their exact
proportions, and all the figures and details that were most
ingeniously imagined and described by that great poet; which conch
was held in those times to be a marvellous thing.

Next, in the Chapel of Francesco del Pugliese at Campora, a seat of
the Monks of the Badia, without Florence, he painted a panel in
distemper of S. Bernard, to whom Our Lady is appearing with certain
angels, while he is writing in a wood; which picture is held to be
admirable in certain respects, such as rocks, books, herbage, and
similar things, that he painted therein, besides the portrait from
life of Francesco himself, so excellent