e the Magdalen in
the large picture of the "Pieta"[400] we can never be sure that he will
not break the spell by forms of almost vulgar mediocrity. The story that
his wife, a worthless woman, sat for his Madonnas, and the legends of his
working for money to meet pressing needs, seem justified by numbers of his
paintings, faulty in their faultlessness and want of spirit. Still, after
making these deductions, we must allow that Andrea del Sarto not
unworthily represents the golden age at Florence. There is no affectation,
no false taste, no trickery in his style. His workmanship is always solid;
his hand unerring. If Nature denied him the soul of a poet, and the stern
will needed for escaping from the sordid circumstances of his life, she
gave him some of the highest qualities a painter can desire--qualities of
strength, tranquillity, and thoroughness, that in the decline of the
century ceased to exist outside Venice.

Among Del Sarto's followers it will be enough to mention Franciabigio,
Vasari's favourite in fresco painting, Rosso de' Rossi, who carried the
Florentine manner into France, and Pontormo, the masterly painter of
portraits.[401] In the historical pictures of these men, whether sacred
or secular, it is clear how much was done for Florentine art by Fra
Bartolommeo and Del Sarto independently of Michael Angelo and Lionardo.
Angelo Bronzino, the pupil of Pontormo, is chiefly valuable for his
portraits. Hard and cold, yet obviously true to life, they form a gallery
of great interest for the historian of Duke Cosimo's reign. His frescoes
and allegories illustrate the defects that have been pointed out in those
of Raphael's and Buonarroti's imitators.[402] Want of thought and feeling,
combined with the presumptuous treatment of colossal and imaginative
subjects, renders these compositions inexpressibly chilling. The
psychologist, who may have read a poem from Bronzino's pen, will be
inclined to wonder how far this barren art was not connected with personal
corruption.[403] Such speculations are, however, apt to be misleading.

Siena, after a long period of inactivity, received a fresh impulse at the
same time as Florence. Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, or Razzi, called Il Sodoma,
was born at Vercelli about 1477. He studied in his youth under Lionardo da
Vinci, training his own exquisite sense of natural beauty in that
scientific school. From Milan, after a certain interval of time, he
removed to Rome, where he became a fr