While Giorgio was occupied with this painting, GiovanAntonio sometimes went to see him work, and remaining to converse with him, would observe, “Now do I perceive that it is by continual study and labour alone that men obtain facility, and escape the disadvantage of a laborious and painful manner in our art, which does not descend upon us as doth the Holy Ghost.”[1]
Giovan-Antonio did not work much in fresco, finding the colours too liable to change, but there is, nevertheless, a picture by his hand in this manner, over the church of Murello, a Pieta namely, with two little nude figures of Angels, which are tolerably well executed.[2] Giovan-Antonio was a man of good judgment, and not unpractised in the ways of the world. In the year 1552 he fell sick of an extremely virulent fever, and being then in the sixtieth year of his age, he sank beneath the violence of that disease, whereof he ultimately died.
A disciple of Giovan-Antonio Lappoli was Bartolommeo Torri, who was born of a not undistinguished family in Arezzo, and who, having repaired to Rome, there placed himself under that most excellent miniaturist, Don Giulio Clovio. Bartolommeo did indeed devote himself so earnestly to drawing and the study of the nude figure, but more particularly to anatomy, that he became a truly able artist, and was accounted the best designer in Rome. And with respect to the.anatomical studies of Bartolommeo, Don Silvano Razzi told me no long time since that Don Giulio Clovio had assured him, after having very highly extolled the youth, that he would not have suffered him to leave his dwelling, had it not been for the grievous impurities occasioned by those pursuits in anatomy; but that he had his rooms so constantly filled with limbs of men and other fragments of the human frame, which he kept even under his bed, as to poison the house withal.
Bartolommeo neglected himself also in other respects, and thinking that to live in the fashion of a would-be philosopher,
