ANIMAL LIFE IN ITALIAN PAINTING 



These frescoes are full of animal life, very unequally- 

 painted. A swan with a ludicrous neck and altogether 

 ill-shaped is close to his own portrait; an equally bad 

 peacock appears in the scene in which a raven and 

 a cat are feeding, with characteristic action, on different 

 sides of a pillar. Several assistants were employed 

 here. 



According to Vasari, who loathed him, Giovanni 

 Antonio Bazzi's house was almost as hospitable to the 

 lower creatures as Noah's ark. ** He delighted in 

 keeping all sorts of strange animals in his house — 

 badgers, squirrels, monkeys, dwarf asses, Barbary 

 steeds to run in the palio, ponies from Elba, jays, 

 bantams, Indian turtle-doves, and other animals of a 

 similar kind."^ An ape rode with him on the saddle 

 in the race of San Bernaba in Florence. He had a 

 raven which would imitate his voice so exactly that if 

 any one knocked at the door it was as though Sodoma 

 himself had said, " Come in ! " 



Talking birds seem to have been much prized. 

 The Archduke Philip's green parrot has already 

 been mentioned. Salimbene, two centuries earlier, 

 tells us of a talking crow of Gregorio di Montelungo, 

 in Ferrara. "The crow talked like a man, and was 

 great at taking people in. It used to get up in the 



^ Le Vite, ed. Milanesi, vol. vi. p. 380 ; Lives, vol. iii. p. 356. 



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