Giovanni Gualberto del Giocondo, and of his brother Messer Niccolo,
a Canon of S. Lorenzo in Florence.

The same master made many other pictures, which are dispersed among
the houses of citizens, and in particular some wherein may be seen a
half-length figure of Cleopatra, causing an asp to bite her on the
breast, and others wherein is the Roman Lucretia killing herself
with a dagger. There are also some very beautiful portraits from
life and pictures by the same hand at the Porta a Pinti, in the
house of Giulio Scali, a man whose judgment is as fine in the
matters of our arts as it is in those of every other most noble and
most honourable profession. Domenico executed for Francesco del
Giocondo, in a panel for his chapel in the great tribune of the
Church of the Servi at Florence, a S. Francis who is receiving the
Stigmata; which work is very sweet and soft in colouring, and
wrought with much diligence. In the Church of Cestello, round the
Tabernacle of the Sacrament, he painted two angels in fresco, and on
the panel of a chapel in the same church he made a Madonna with her
Son in her arms, S. John the Baptist, S. Bernard, and other saints.
And since it appeared to the monks of that place that he had
acquitted himself very well in those works, they caused him to paint
in a cloister of their Abbey of Settimo, without Florence, the
Visions of Count Ugo, who built seven abbeys. And no long time
after, Puligo painted, in a shrine at the corner of the Via Mozza da
S. Catarina, a Madonna standing, with her Son in her arms marrying
S. Catherine, and a figure of S. Peter Martyr. For a Company in the
township of Anghiari he executed a Deposition from the Cross, which
may be numbered among his best works.

But since it was his profession to attend rather to pictures of Our
Lady, portraits, and other heads, than to great works, he gave up
almost all his time to such things. Now if he had devoted himself
not so much to the pleasures of the world, as he did, and more to
the labours of art, there is no doubt that he would have made great
proficience in painting, and especially as Andrea del Sarto, who was
much his friend, assisted him on many occasions both with advice and
with drawings; for which reason many of his works reveal a
draughtsmanship as fine as the good and beautiful manner of the
colouring. But the circumstance that Domenico was unwilling to
endure much fatigue, and accustomed to labour rather in order to get
throug