rate the courtyard of the Convent of the
Servi, now known as the Church of the Annunciation; and moving into
adjacent lodgings, Andrea met Jacopo Sansovino, the Venetian sculptor,
whose portrait by Bassano is in the Uffizi, a capable all-round
man who had studied in Rome and was in the way of helping the young
Andrea at all points. It was then too that he met the agreeable and
convivial Rustici, of whom I have said something in the chapter on
the Baptistery, and quickly became something of a blood--for by this
time, the second decade of the sixteenth century, the simplicity of
the early artists had given place to dashing sophistication and the
great period was nearly over. For this change the brilliant complex
inquiring mind of Leonardo da Vinci was largely responsible, together
with the encouragement and example of Lorenzo de' Medici and such of
his cultured sceptical friends as Alberti, Pico della Mirandola, and
Poliziano. But that is a subject too large for this book. Enough that
a worldly splendour and vivacity had come into artistic life and Andrea
was an impressionable young man in the midst of it. It does not seem to
have affected the power and dexterity of his hand, but it made him a
religious court-painter instead of a religious painter. His sweetness
and an underlying note of pathos give his work a peculiar and genuine
character; but he is just not of the greatest. Not so great really
as Luca Signorelli, for example, whom few visitors to the galleries
rush at with gurgling cries of rapture as they rush at Andrea.

When Andrea was twenty-six he married. The lady was the widow of a
hatter. Andrea had long loved her, but the hatter clung outrageously
to life. In 1513, however, she was free, and, giving her hand to the
painter, his freedom passed for ever. Vasari being among Andrea's
pupils may be trusted here, and Vasari gives her a bad character,
which Browning completes. Andrea painted her often, notably in the
fresco of the "Nativity of the Virgin," to which we shall soon come
at the Annunziata: a fine statuesque woman by no means unwilling to
have the most popular artist in Florence as her slave.

Of the rest of Andrea's life I need say little. He grew steadily in
favour and was always busy; he met Michelangelo and admired him, and
Michelangelo warned Raphael in Rome of a little fellow in Florence who
would "make him sweat". Browning, in his monologue, makes this remark
of Michelangelo's, and the comparison