t Duomo, beside those of Sogliani and Beccafumi. In one is the Dead
Christ with Our Lady and the other Maries, and in the other Abraham
sacrificing his son Isaac; but since these pictures did not succeed
very well, the Warden, who had intended to make him paint some
altar-pieces for the church, dismissed him, knowing that men who do
not study, once they have lost in old age the quality of excellence
that they had in their youth from nature, are left with a kind of
facility of manner that is generally little to be praised. At that
same time Giovanni Antonio finished an altar-piece that he had
previously begun in oils for S. Maria della Spina, painting in it Our
Lady with the Child in her arms, with S. Mary Magdalene and S.
Catharine kneeling before her, and S. John, S. Sebastian, and S.
Joseph standing at the sides; in all which figures he acquitted
himself much better than in the two pictures for the Duomo.

Then, having nothing more to do at Pisa, he made his way to Lucca,
where, at S. Ponziano, a seat of the Monks of Monte Oliveto, an Abbot
of his acquaintance caused him to paint a Madonna on the ascent of a
staircase that leads to the dormitory. That work finished, he returned
weary, old, and poor to Siena, where he did not live much longer; for
he fell ill, through not having anyone to look after him or any means
of sustenance, and went off to the Great Hospital, and there in a few
weeks he finished the course of his life.

[Illustration: THE SACRIFICE OF ISAAC

(_After the painting by =Giovanni Antonio Bazzi [Il Sodoma]=. Pisa:
Duomo_)

_Alinari_]

Giovanni Antonio, when young and in good repute, took for his wife in
Siena a girl born of a very good family, and had by her in the first
year a daughter. But after that, having grown weary of her, because he
was a beast, he would never see her more; and she, therefore,
withdrawing by herself, lived always on her own earnings and on the
interest of her dowry, bearing with great and endless patience the
beastliness and the follies of that husband of hers, who was truly
worthy of the name of Mattaccio which, as has been related, the Monks
of Monte Oliveto gave him.

Riccio of Siena, the disciple of Giovanni Antonio, a passing able and
well-practised painter, having taken as his wife his master's
daughter, who had been very well and decently brought up by her
mother, became the heir to all the possessions connected with art of
his wife's father. This Riccio, I say,