Urbino, was the son of Bartolommeo della Vite, a
citizen of good position, and Calliope, the daughter of Maestro Antonio
Alberto of Ferrara, a passing good painter in his day, as is shown by
his works at Urbino and elsewhere. While Timoteo was still a child, his
father dying, he was left to the care of his mother Calliope, with good
and happy augury, from the circumstance that Calliope is one of the Nine
Muses, and the conformity that exists between poetry and painting. Then,
after he had been brought discreetly through his boyhood by his wise
mother, and initiated by her into the studies of the simpler arts and
likewise of drawing, the young man came into his first knowledge of the
world at the very time when the divine Raffaello Sanzio was flourishing.
Applying himself in his earliest years to the goldsmith's art, he was
summoned by Messer Pier Antonio, his elder brother, who was then
studying at Bologna, to that most noble city, to the end that he might
follow that art, to which he seemed to be inclined by nature, under the
discipline of some good master. While living, then, in Bologna, in which
city he stayed no little time, and was much honoured and received by the
noble and magnificent Messer Francesco Gombruti into his house with
every sort of courtesy, Timoteo associated continually with men of
culture and lofty intellect. Wherefore, having become known in a few
months as a young man of judgment, and inclined much more to the
painter's than to the goldsmith's art, of which he had given proofs in
some very well-executed portraits of his friends and of others, it
seemed good to his brother, wishing to encourage the young man's natural
genius, and also persuaded to this by his friends, to take him away from
his files and chisels, and to make him devote himself entirely to the
study of drawing. At which he was very content, and applied himself
straightway to drawing and to the labours of art, copying and drawing
all the best works in that city; and establishing a close intimacy with
painters, he set out to such purpose on his new road, that it was a
marvel to see the progress that he made from one day to another, and all
the more because he learnt with facility the most difficult things
without any particular teaching from any appointed master. And so,
becoming enamoured of his profession, and learning many secrets of
painting merely by sometimes seeing certain painters of no account
making their mixtures and using th