all his cronies pronounce him to have been a good fellow. On one
occasion he had a good dose of the spirit of criticism, himself,
from a visiting abbot, who stopped to see the Medicean tomb, where
Tasso happened to be working. Tasso was requested to show the stranger
about, which he did. The abbot began by depreciating the beauty of
the building, remarking that Michelangelo's figures in the Sacristy
did not interest him, and on his way up the stairs, he chanced to
look out of a window and caught sight of Brunelleschi's dome. When
the dull ecclesiastic began to say that this dome did not merit
the admiration which it raised, the exasperated Tasso, who was
loyal to his friends, could stand no more. Il Lasca recounts what
happened: "Pulling the abbot backward with force, he made him
tumble down the staircase, and he took good care to fall himself
on top of him, and calling out that the frater had been taken mad,
he bound his arms and legs with cords... and then taking him,
hanging over his shoulders, he carried him to a room near,
stretched him on the ground, and left him there in the dark, taking
away the key." We will hope that if Tasso himself was too prone to
criticism, he may have learned a lesson from this didactic monastic,
and was more tolerant in the future.

Of the work of Canozio, a worker of about the same time, Matteo
Colaccio in 1486, writes, "In visiting these intarsiad figures I
was so much taken with the exquisiteness of the work that I could
not withold myself from praising the author to heaven!" He refers
thus ecstatically to the Stalls at St. Antonio at Padua, which
were inlaid by Canozio, assisted by other masters. For his work
in the Church of St. Domenico in Reggio, the contract called for
some curious observances: he was bound by this to buy material
for fifty lire, to work one third of the whole undertaking for