Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI LATER YEARS CODOMA had worked hitherto for private patrons, or at best for ecclesiastical communities. Of municipal commissions he had received none as yet, and it was only in 1529 that the city gave him his first large public order in the painting of the walls of their council chambers. The great Gothic Palazzo della Signoria which rises at the lower end of the sloping square had already lent its walls to decoration by older and stiffer hands. The pre-Raphaelites of Siena, Lippo Memmi, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and others, had left there certain symbolical frescoes of quaint, grave beauty, rich in phantasy and sentiment, if meagre in line. Sodoma was the first of the moderns called to work there. Whether the Board of Guardians directing the scheme intended to cover the entire walls of the Sala del Mappamondo with decorative frescoes has not been ascertained. At any rate, Sodoma was instructed to paint two huge figures, standing within ornamental niches, which should form pendants to one another, and a third, treated in a similar manner, on the wall at right angles to them. The commission was given him in 1529, and during the same year he completed the two first, the colossal St. Victor over the door which leads Lombardi photo [Patazzo Pubblico, Siena SAINT VICTOR to the Sala della Pace, and the St. Ansano baptising neophytes in the niche near the window. In September, when these were completed, two fellow- painters were called in to estimate their value—Domenico Beccafumi, who had been Sodoma's companion in the work at San Bernardino, and a certain Bartolommeo di David, of whom all that we know, is that a few years later he was associated with Riccio in the painting of a chapel in the Collegiata d' Asciano. These men appraised the works as merit...