Niccolosa Bacci, now in her mid-sixties, knelt beside the bed of her husband, Giorgio Vasari. They had shared many years together and, although she was not schooled in art or history, she absorbed some of her spouse’s knowledge through his works. It had been a long and loving relationship, though regretfully it produced no children. Niccolosa suspected that her husband had become entangled with another woman prior to their marriage, a housemaid, and that this union might have produced offspring. But she chose to ignore the facts; suffering at times, perhaps, for not producing a child from her own womb.
The Vasari house was already prepared for his death, with black drapes being prepared for hanging from the stone portals of the palazzo they built in Arezzo outside of his beloved Florence.
