You now see whether these are works which would lead us
to be silent about our city."
And she was already ceasing to speak, when I remembered me, and said:
"No doubt your Excellency also forgot the famous tomb or chapel of the
Medici in San Lorenzo, at Florence, painted in marble by M. Angelo, with
such a generous number of statues in full relief that it can certainly
compete with any of the great works of antiquity; where the goddess or
image of Night, sleeping above the nocturnal bird, and the melancholy
Death in Life pleased me the most, although there are there many noble
sculptures around the Dawn. But I cannot omit the mention of a painting
which I saw, even though it was outside Italy, in France or Provence, in
the City of Avignon, in a Franciscan monastery: it is that of a dead woman
who had been very beautiful, she was called the Beautiful Anna; a king of
France who liked painting and who painted (if I am not mistaken) called
Reynel, came to Avignon and inquired whether the Beautiful Anna was there
because he greatly desired to see her to paint her from life, and having
been told that she had died shortly before, the king caused her to be
disinterred to see whether still in her bones there were some traces of
her beauty. He found her clothed, in the old style, as if she were alive,
with her golden hair dressed on her head, but all the gay beauty of the
face, which alone was uncovered, had changed into a skull; notwithstanding
this, the painter king considered it so beautiful that he painted her from
nature, surrounding his work with verses which mourn and are still
mourning for her.
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