exactly suited my own fancy. The clever surgeon paid me very well, and
yet the honour which the vases brought me was worth a hundred times as
much; for the best craftsmen in the goldsmith's trade declared they had
never seen anything more beautiful or better executed.

No sooner had I finished them than he showed them to the Pope; and the
next day following he betook himself away from Rome. He was a man of
much learning, who used to discourse wonderfully about medicine. The
Pope would fain have had him in his service, but he replied that he
would not take service with anybody in the world, and that whoso had
need of him might come to seek him out. He was a person of great
sagacity, and did wisely to get out of Rome; for not many months
afterwards, all the patients he had treated grew so ill that they were a
hundred times worse off than before he came. He would certainly have
been murdered if he had stopped. He showed my little vases to several
persons of quality; amongst others, to the most excellent Duke of
Ferrara, and pretended that he had got them from a great lord in Rome,
by telling this nobleman that if he wanted to be cured, he must give him
those two vases; and that the lord had answered that they were antique,
and besought him to ask for anything else which it might be convenient
for him to give, provided only he would leave him those; but, according
to his own account, Maestro Giacomo made as though he would not
undertake the cure, and so he got them.

I was told this by Messer Alberto Bendedio in Ferrara, who with great
ostentation showed me some earthenware copies he possessed of them. [2]
Thereupon I laughed, and as I said nothing, Messer Alberto Bendedio, who
was a haughty man, flew into a rage and said: "You are laughing at them,
are you? And I tell you that during the last thousand years there has
not been born a man capable of so much as copying them." I then, not