short time, having attained great excellence in the art, he was entrusted by the superintendents of Santa Maria del Fiore with the decoration of the semicircular space within the building, above the principal door of the church. He there executed the Coronation of the Virgin in mosaic ; and when this work was completed, it was declared by all the masters, foreign as well as native, to be the most beautiful mosaic that had yet been seen in Italy, evincing more judgment, better design, and greater care, than any work of the kind then to be found in the country.[1] The fame of this mosaic quickly spreading, Gaddo was invited to Rome, by Clement V, in the year 1308—which was the year after the church and palaces of the Lateran had been destroyed by fire—where he completed certain Mosaics for that pontiff, which had been left unfinished by Fra Jacopo da Turrita.
Gaddo afterwards executed other works, also in Mosaic, for the principal chapel of San Pietro, and for other parts of the church, but more particularly for the façade whereon he executed the colossal representation of God the Father, with many figures.[2] He also assisted to complete some of the mosaics on the façade of Santa Maria Maggiore,[3] ameliorating the manner a little, and departing somewhat from that Greek style, which in itself had nothing meritorious.
Returned to Tuscany, Gaddo was commissioned by the Tarlati, lords of Pietramala, to execute some Mosaics for the old cathedral of Arezzo, which stands without the city ; these were the decorations of a vaulted roof, erected wholly of tufa, over the middle part of the church, to replace one of stone, which had fallen, by its own weight, in the time of the Bishop Gentile, of Urbino,[4] when that prelate erected a roof of brickwork in its place. From Arezzo, Gaddo repaired to Pisa, where he executed a figure of the Virgin ascending into heaven, in a recess over the Chapel dell’ Incoronata, in the cathedral of that city ; above the Virgin, was a figure of Christ
