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.”
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.
Note 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.
Note 2. The medal commemorated a deep well sunk by Clement at Orvieto.