and the Assumption on the side of the
choir. These panels have now been removed, both one and the other,
and replaced by the Tabernacle of the Sacrament; they have been set
up over certain other altars in that church, and out of the whole
work there only remain six pictures, wherein are some saints painted
by Pietro in certain niches. It is said that when the work was
unveiled, it received no little censure from all the new craftsmen,
particularly because Pietro had availed himself of those figures
that he had been wont to use in other pictures; with which his
friends twitted him, saying that he had taken no pains, and that he
had abandoned the good method of working, either through avarice or
to save time. To this Pietro would answer: "I have used the figures
that you have at other times praised, and which have given you
infinite pleasure; if now they do not please you, and you do not
praise them, what can I do?" But they kept assailing him bitterly
with sonnets and open insults; whereupon, although now old, he
departed from Florence and returned to Perugia.

There he executed certain works in fresco in the Church of S.
Severo, a place belonging to the Monks of the Order of Camaldoli,
wherein Raffaello da Urbino, when quite young and still the disciple
of Pietro, had painted certain figures, as will be told in his Life.
Pietro likewise worked at Montone, at La Fratta, and in many other
places in the district of Perugia; more particularly in S. Maria
degli Angeli at Assisi, where he painted in fresco a Christ on the
Cross, with many figures, on the wall at the back of the Chapel of
the Madonna, which faces the choir of the monks. And for the
high-altar of the Church of S. Pietro, an abbey of Black Friars in
Perugia, he painted a large panel containing the Ascension, with the
Apostles below gazing up to Heaven; in the predella of which panel
are three stories, wrought with much diligence--namely, that of the
Magi, the Baptism of Christ, and His Resurrection. The whole of this
picture is seen to be full of beautiful and careful work, insomuch
that it is the best of those wrought in oil by the hand of Pietro
which are in Perugia. The same man began a work in fresco of no
small importance at Castello della Pieve, but did not finish it.

It was ever Pietro's custom on his going and coming between the said
Castello and Perugia, like a man who trusted nobody, to carry all
the money that he possessed about his person. Wheref