and partly for the pleasure of once again visiting his native place, proceeded to Florence, where he arrived a short time before the court had reached that city. He then received a commission to prepare a figure seven braccia high for the Arch erected at Santa Trinita, another of equal size being confided at the same time to Toto del Nunziata, who had been his rival in childhood, and who now executed that figure in competition with him.
But to Pietro every hour seemed a thousand years till he could get back to Pome, seeing that the degrees and modes of proceeding among the Florentine artists appeared to him something very different from what he had been accustomed to in Rome. He departed from Florence therefore, and returned to Rome accordingly, where he resumed his usual course of life and habits of occupation. In Sant’ Eustachio della Dogana, Perino then painted a figure of San Pietro in fresco;[1] this is a work which exhibits extraordinary relief, the draperies are particularly simple in their folds, the drawing is admirable, and the execution singularly judicious.
Now at that time it chanced that the Archbishop of Cyprus, a man who greatly delighted in art, but more especially in painting, was in Rome, and he, having a house near the Chiavica, around which he had laid out a small garden adorned with a few statues and other antiquities, all being certainly arranged with infinite beauty and decorum; having these statues, I say, the Archbishop desired to add to them some appropriate ornament in painting, wherefore he caused Perino, who was his very intimate friend, to be summoned, and having consulted together, they determined that there should be various stories depicted around the walls of the garden, exhibiting Bacchantes, Satyrs, Furies, and wild animals, all having some reference or allusion to a certain antique statue of Bacchus, seated, with a tiger beside him, which the Archbishop had there; and thus they adorned the place accordingly with divers poesies. They constructed a Loggia likewise, which they decorated with small figures, grottesche, and numerous pictures, landscapes among others, and these are painted with so much grace, and in so careful a
- ↑ Destroyed in the reparation of the church, as were the works of Baldassare Peruzzi and Pelegrino Tibaldi. — Bottari.
