nal, who declared that this portrait surpassed by a
great measure all those that Sebastiano had ever executed up to that
day, as indeed it did; and the work was afterwards sent to King Francis
of France, who had it placed in his Palace of Fontainebleau.

[Illustration: ANDREA DORIA

(_After the painting by =Fra Sebastiano del Piombo=. Rome: Palazzo
Doria_)

_Anderson_]

This painter then introduced a new method of painting on stone, which
pleased people greatly, for it appeared that by this means pictures
could be made eternal, and such that neither fire nor worms could harm
them. Wherefore he began to paint many pictures on stone in this manner,
surrounding them with ornaments of variegated kinds of stone, which,
being polished, formed a very beautiful setting; although it is true
that these pictures, with their ornaments, when finished, could not be
transported or even moved, on account of their great weight, save with
the greatest difficulty. Many persons, then, attracted by the novelty of
the work and by the beauty of his art, gave him earnest-money, in order
that he might execute some for them; but he, delighting more to talk
about such pictures than to work at them, always kept delaying
everything. Nevertheless he executed on stone a Dead Christ with the
Madonna, with an ornament also of stone, for Don Ferrante Gonzaga, who
sent it to Spain. The whole work together was held to be very beautiful,
and Sebastiano was paid five hundred crowns for the painting by Messer
Niccolo da Cortona, agent in Rome for the Cardinal of Mantua. In this
kind of painting Sebastiano was truly worthy of praise, for the reason
that whereas Domenico, his compatriot, who was the first to paint in
oils on walls, and after him Andrea dal Castagno, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and
Piero Pollaiuolo, failed to find the means of preventing the figures
executed by them in this manner from becoming black and fading away very
quickly, Sebastiano did find it; wherefore the Christ at the Column,
which he painted in S. Pietro in Montorio, has never changed down to our
own time, and has the same freshness of colouring as on the first day.
For he went about the work with such diligence that he used to make the
coarse rough-cast of lime with a mixture of mastic and colophony,
which, after melting it all together over the fire and applying it to
the wall, he would then cause to be smoothed over with a mason's trowel
made red-hot, or rather white-hot, in the fi