productions of the art, should have been left unfinished, and be now permitted to remain in pieces on the earth, instead of being erected in some befitting position: neither am I surprised to find that some of the figures have been carried off and sold, to be afterwards put up elsewhere and for other purposes.[1] But there is, now-a -days, so little humanity or rather gratitude, to be found amongst men, that among all the many who were favoured by, and received benefits from, the noble Gaston, none has been known to give himself any concern for the memory of De Foix, any more than for the excellence and beauty of the work thus abandoned. There are other works by the same Agostino Busto, in the cathedral for example, as well as in San Francesco, where there is the tomb of the Biraghi family, as we have said: at the Certosa of Pavia also there are examples of his ability with many others, in different places, which are for the most part truly admirable.
Among the competitors of Agostino Busto was a certain Cristofano Gobbo[2], who also executed numerous works on the façade of the above-named monastery of the Certosa, as he did also in the church, and these he effected so well that he may justly be enumerated among the best sculptors at that time in Lombardy. The figures of Adam and Eve, which are on the eastern front of the cathedral of Milan, are in like manner by the hand of Cristofano, and are considered remarkable works, such, in short, as may well bear compari-
- ↑ De Pagave, in his notes to the Sienese Edition of our author, gives some account of the dispersion of the works prepared for this magnificent tomb. A large quantity of the precious sculptures were taken to the Villa Castellazzo, near Milan, formerly the property of the Counts Arconati, but now belonging to the Busea family. Some of the pieces are carefully preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, where the present writer remembers to have seen them in the year 1837, as also in 1841, and again in 1845; whether they yet remain there may now perhaps be reasonably doubted. Others are said to be in the Brera. Cicognara, Storia della Scultura Moderna, tom. ii. has given plates very carefully engraved in outline of a certain portion, (see plates Ixxvii. and lxxviii.) and at p. 355 of the same works he declares himself to have seen some of these works in Paris.
- ↑ Cristofano Solari, called the Gobbo (Hunchback), of Milan, was a brother of that Andrea, who is mentioned by Vasari at the end of the Life of Correggio; see vol. ii. p. 411.
