decorations of foliage thus left incomplete by his father, with great zeal and diligence; and this ornament is one of the rarest and most beautiful specimens of work in bronze that can possibly be seen. Bonaccorso died young, and did not produce so many works as he most probably would have done, seeing that the secret of casting in such a manner that the work should succeed well and present an extreme delicacy of appearance, remained to him, as well as that of perforating the metal in the mode observable in the works left by Lorenzo, who, to say nothing of his own performance, bequeathed many relics of antiquity to his family, some in marble, others in bronze. Among these was the bed of Polycletus, which was a most rare thing;[1] a leg of bronze, of the size of life, with certain heads, male and female, and some vases, which Lorenzo had caused to be brought from Greece at no small cost. He also left the torsi of many figures, with a great number of similar things, which were all dispersed; and, like the property acquired by Lorenzo, suffered to be destroyed and squandered. Some of these antiquities were sold to Messer Giovanni Gaddi, then “Cherico di Camera”, and among them was the aforesaid bed of Polycletus and some other matters, which formed the better part of the collection.[2]
Bonaccorso left a son called Vittorio, who studied sculpture, but with very little success, as may be seen from the heads which he executed in the palace of the duke of Gra-
- ↑ Schorn remarks that it is not easy to say what is meant by this “bed of Polycletus”, but he inclines to think the recumbent figure in Greek marble, now in the Florentine gallery, to be that here alluded to. He refers his readers to Fiorillo, Geschichte der Malerei, i, 429.
- ↑ Among these were the torso of a Satyr, a work of the best period of Greece, with those of a copy of the Medicean Venus, and of a winged genius; another torso of another Venus, a Narcissus and a Mercury were also of the number. The first of these torsi is in the Florentine gallery; the second, on the extinction of the Gaddi family, passed into the possession of a Marchese di Sorbello, who had married a lady of that house, and who presented the torso to a Signor Oddi of Perugia, his nephew (whose family still possesses a valuable collection of antiquities in that city). The third, which is believed to be a work of Praxiteles, and which came also to the Marchese di Sorbello, was afterwards possessed by the Cav,
giving them the fatal thrust, which would leave his holiness suspended in the air. Jacopo Salviati, in the garb of a monk, was assisting in this operation; and the emperor was seated near, with a naked sword in his hand, on the point of which was written, Amici, ad quid venisti? and which he held towards the pontiff.”
