account shall the renown of any one among them be defrauded of its just extent, so far as in me lies to prevent it; each shall have what is due to him, but since the order of time and of their merits so demands, I propose to begin with Fra Giocondo.[1]
When the subject of the present memoir took the habit of San Domenico,[2] he was called not Fra Giocondo merely, but Fra Giovanni Giocondo: how he dropped the name of Giovanni I know not, but I know that he was always called Fra Giocondo by every one.[3] The time of Fra Giocondo was principally occupied with learning and the sciences, he was a philosopher, a theologian, and an excellent Greek scholar, which was a rare thing at that time, seeing that learning was then but just beginning to revive in Italy. Fra Giocondo was moreover an admirable architect, and constantly found the utmost pleasure in the exercise of that vocation, as is related by Scaliger in his letter to Cardanus, and as we find mentioned by the learned Budoeus in his book De Asse, who also refers to the subject again in his observations on the Pandects.
Fra Giocondo then, renowned as a man of letters, an excellent architect, and well versed in the laws of perspective, was for many years near the person of the Emperor Maximilian, and was master in the Greek and Latin tongues to the very learned Scaliger,[4] who affirms that he has heard him engaged in profound and able disputations on the most recondite subjects in the presence of the Emperor Maximilian. There are persons still living who remember and relate that in the lifetime of that Monarch, the bridge called Della Pietra,[5] in Verona, had to be restored which was done
- ↑ He was bom at Verona in the year 1453.
- ↑ The Franciscans dispute the possession of this master with the Dominicans, affirming that he belongs to them. For this question, see the Preface of Della Valle to the Sienese Edition of Vasari.
- ↑ Panvinius, the mathematician, and Fra Luca Paccioli also give us notices of Fra Giocondo, as do the two Scaligers, father and son.
- ↑ Giulio Cesare Scaligero namely, the father of Giuseppe, or the younger Scaliger.— Bottari. See Jul. Cas. Scalig. de Subtil, ad Cardanum Franc., p. 400, where Fra Giocondo is mentioned as a prodigy of knowledge.
- ↑ An old Roman structure, of which two arches only now remain. The works of Fra Giocondo, which, as our author promised himself should “endui’e through all time,” were totally destroyed in the flood of 1757, but had withstood the rage of the waters during more than two hundred winters.
