pression than
of any other of the old masters, by reason largely of Browning's
poem and not a little by that beautiful portrait which for so long
was erroneously considered to represent the painter himself, in our
National Gallery. Andrea's life was not very happy. No painter had
more honour in his own day, and none had a greater number of pupils,
but these stopped with him only a short time, owing to the demeanour
towards them of Andrea's wife, who developed into a flirt and shrew,
dowered with a thousand jealousies. Andrea, the son of a tailor, was
born in 1486 and apprenticed to a goldsmith. Showing, however, more
drawing than designing ability, he was transferred to a painter named
Barile and then passed to that curious man of genius who painted the
fascinating picture "The Death of Procris" which hangs near Andrea's
portrait in our National Gallery--Piero di Cosimo. Piero carried
oddity to strange lengths. He lived alone in indescribable dirt,
and lived wholly on hard-boiled eggs, which he cooked, with his glue,
by the fifty, and ate as he felt inclined. He forbade all pruning of
trees as an act of insubordination to Nature, and delighted in rain
but cowered in terror from thunder and lightning. He peered curiously
at clouds to find strange shapes in them, and in his pursuit of the
grotesque examined the spittle of sick persons on the walls or ground,
hoping for suggestions of monsters, combats of horses, or fantastic
landscapes. But why this should have been thought madness in Cosimo
when Leonardo in his directions to artists explicitly advises them
to look hard at spotty walls for inspiration, I cannot say. He
was also the first, to my knowledge, to don ear-caps in tedious
society--as Herbert Spencer later used to do. He had many pupils,
but latterly could not bear them in his presence and was therefore
but an indifferent instructor. As a deviser of pageants he was more in
demand than as a painter; but his brush was not idle. Both London and
Paris have, I think, better examples of his genius than the Uffizi;
but he is well represented at S. Spirito.

Piero sent Andrea to the Palazzo Vecchio to study the Leonardo and
Michelangelo cartoons, and there he met Franciabigio, with whom
he struck up one of his close friendships, and together they took a
studio and began to paint for a living. Their first work together was
the Baptism of Christ at which we are now looking. The next commission
after the Scalzo was to deco