, in the
dearth of personal matter, and is the best known incident in his life,
but it is more than probable that Antonio was carried off by the plague
which, following close on the heels of the war of 1502, attacked
Cortona, in which case it becomes a mere legend. We learn from a
document, dated June 23rd, that the painter's house was not spared, for
he excused himself from serving as Priore in that month, because the
_peste bubbonica_ had broken out in his family.

Four years later, Polidoro, his eldest son, and his assistant at
Orvieto, died also. This happened while Signorelli was on a visit to
Siena, for it was there he bought the mourning cloth. The object of this
visit was to design one of the subjects for the famous pavement of the
Cathedral, but whether he ever did it we do not know; certainly it was
never executed in marble.

In the next year we have the usual records of official appointments, and
as a proof of his artistic activity, the two pictures still remaining in
the little town of Arcevia, dated 1507 and 1508, one of them, the
splendid _Ancona_, being among his finest works.

Now a man of nearly seventy, Signorelli's energies seemed to grow
greater with increasing age, for in 1508 we find him, besides being
elected to his usual offices, deputed as ambassador to Florence, to
demand there permission to reform the offices and ordinances of Cortona,
and in the same year he was at Rome, together with Perugino,
Pintorricchio, and Sodoma, working at the decoration of the Vatican
Chambers, already begun by Pier dei Franceschi. Giambattista Caporali
gives a glimpse into their social life in Rome, telling of a supper
given in their honour by Bramante[21]--Bramante, to whose introduction
to the Pope of the young Raffaelle it is due that none of their work,
with the exception of Perugino's ceiling, remains to us. How much
Signorelli painted we do not know. Vasari says, "He had successfully
completed one wall,"[22] but so enchanted was Julius II. with the
facile and modern style of Raffaelle, that after he had finished the
"Stanza della Segnatura," he forced him to destroy the paintings of the
older masters and delivered the entire work to him and his assistants: a
caprice which points a very significant turn in the history of
painting--the triumph of the late Renaissance over the giants of the
past.

Signorelli seemed destined to find nothing but disappointment in Rome.
Five years later, an old man of seventy-