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Book FirstPart LXXI
Part LXXI
Not many days had passed before, my medal being finished, I stamped it in
gold, silver, and copper. After I had shown it to Messer Pietro, he
immediately introduced me to the Pope. It was on a day in April after dinner,
and the weather very fine; the Pope was in the Belvedere. After entering the
presence, I put my medals together with the dies of steel into his hand. He
took them, and recognising at once their mastery of art, looked Messer Pietro
in the face and said: "The ancients never had such medals made for them as
these."
While he and the others were inspecting them, taking up now the dies and
now the medals in their hands, I began to speak as submissively as I was able:
"If a greater power had not controlled the working of my inauspicious stars,
and hindered that with which they violently menaced me, your Holiness, without
your fault or mine, would have lost a faithful and loving servant. It must,
most blessed Father, be allowed that in those cases where men are risking all
upon one throw, it is not wrong to do as certain poor and simple men are wont
to say, who tell us we must mark seven times and cut once. ^1 Your Holiness
will remember how the malicious and lying tongue of my bitter enemy so easily
aroused your anger, that you ordered the Governor to have me taken on the spot
and hanged; but I have no doubt that when you had become aware of the
irreparable act by which you would have wronged yourself, in cutting off from
you a servant such as even now your Holiness hath said he is, I am sure, I
repeat, that, before God and the world, you would have felt no trifling
twinges of remorse. Excellent and virtuous fathers, and masters of like
quality, ought not to let their arm in wrath descend upon their sons and
servants with such inconsiderate haste, seeing that subsequent repentance will
avail them nothing. But now that God has overruled the malign influences of
the stars and saved me for your Holiness, I humbly beg you another time not to
let yourself so easily be stirred to rage against me."
[Footnote 1: Segnar sette e tagliar uno. A proverb derived possibly from
felling trees; or, as some commentators interpret, from the points made by
sculptors on their marble before they block the statue out.]
The Pope had stopped from looking at the medals and was now listening
attentively to what I said. There were many noblemen of the greatest
consequence present, which made him blush a little, as it were for shame; and
not knowing how else to extricate himself from this entanglement, he said that
he could not remember having given such an order. I changed the conversation
in order to cover his embarrassment. His Holiness then began to speak again
about the medals, and asked what method I had used to stamp them so
marvelously, large as they were; for he had never met with ancient pieces of
that size. We talked a little on this subject; but being not quite easy that I
might not begin another lecture sharper than the last, he praised my medals,
and said they gave him the greatest satisfaction, but that he should like
another reverse made according to a fancy of his own, if it were possible to
stamp them with two different patterns. I said that it was possible to do so.
Then his Holiness commissioned me to design the history of Moses when he
strikes the rock and water issues from it, with this motto: Ut bibat
populus. ^2 At last he added: "Go Benvenuto; you will not have finished it
before I have provided for your fortune." After I had taken leave, the Pope
proclaimed before the whole company that he would give me enough to live on
wealthily without the need of labouring for any one but him. So I devoted
myself entirely to working out this reverse with the Moses on it.
[Footnote 2: The medal commemorated a deep well sunk by Clement at Orvieto.]
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