ressive; and whatever
he did seems inevitable and right.

Vasari wrote a very full life of Sansovino, not included among his other
Lives but separately published. In this we learn that Jacopo was born in
Florence in 1477, the son of a mattress-maker named Tatti; but
apparently 1486 is the right date. Appreciating his natural bent towards
art, his mother had him secretly taught to draw, hoping that he might
become a great sculptor like Michael Angelo, and he was put as
apprentice to the sculptor Andrea Contucci of Monte Sansovino, who had
recently set up in Florence and was at work on two figures for San
Giovanni; and Jacopo so attached himself to the older man that he became
known as Sansovino too. Another of his friends as a youth was Andrea del
Sarto.

From Florence he passed to Rome, where he came under the patronage of
the Pope Julius II, of Bramante, the architect, and of Perugino, the
painter, and learned much by his studies there. Returning to Florence,
he became one of the most desired of sculptors and executed that superb
modern-antique, the Bacchus in the Bargello. Taking to architecture, he
continued his successful progress, chiefly again in Rome, but when the
sack of that city occurred in 1527 he fled and to the great good fortune
of Venice took refuge here. The Doge, Andrea Gritti, welcomed so
distinguished a fugitive and at once set him to work on the restoration
of S. Mark's cupolas, and this task he completed with such skill that
he was made a Senior Procurator and given a fine house and salary.

As a Procurator he seems to have been tactful and active, and Vasari
gives various examples of his reforming zeal by which the annual income
of the Procuranzia was increased by two thousand ducats. When, however,
one of the arches of Sansovino's beautiful library fell, owing to a
subsidence of the foundations, neither his eminent position nor ability
prevented the authorities from throwing him into prison as a bad
workman; nor was he liberated, for all his powerful friends, without a
heavy fine. He built also several fine palaces, the mint, and various
churches, but still kept time for his early love, sculpture, as his
perfect little Loggetta, and the giants on the Staircase, and such a
tomb as that in S. Salvatore, show.

[Illustration: S. JEROME IN HIS CELL
FROM THE PAINTING BY CARPACCIO
_At S. Giorgio dei Schiavoni_]

This is Vasari's description of the man: "Jacopo Sansovino, as to his
person, was