tion and design, lie would have justly merited to be considered most admirable.[1]
In Santa Maria del Fiore, Andrea dal Castagno depicted the likeness of Niccolò da Tolentino[2] on horseback; and while engaged on this work, a child who was passing by, shook the ladder on which he stood; when Andrea, like a brutally violent man as he was, got down and ran after him to the corner of the Pazzi. Beneath the charnel-house in the cemetery of Santa Maria Nuova, he painted a figure of Sant’ Andrea, which gave so much satisfaction that he was at once appointed to paint a picture of the Last Supper in the refectory used by the servants and other officials of the house.[3] These works obtained him great favour with the superintendent of the hospital and the Portinari family; and procured him a commission to decorate a portion of the principal chapel with pictures; a second part being confided to Alesso Baldovinetti; and the then renowned painter, Domenico Veneziano, being engaged to execute the third; he having been invited to Florence on account of the new method, which he had acquired, of painting in oil.[4] Each of these artists, therefore, gave his attention to his own division of the work, but Andrea was in the highest degree envious of Domenico, because, although he felt conscious that he was himself superior to the Venetian painter in design, he was, nevertheless, enraged to see that he, who was a foreigner, received marks of esteem and friendship from
- ↑ The three pictures by this master are still remaining in the Florentine gallery—St. Jerome, Mary Magdalen, and John the Baptist, namely; all display the defects of his colouring, which is excessively hard, dark, and dry in all; the faces also have something low and evil in them. —Masselli, and Germ. Ed. vol. iii. p. 37.
- ↑ Niccolò di Giovanni de’ Maurucci of Tolentino, elected captain-general of the Florentines in 1433. He was made prisoner in the same year by the Milanese general, Niccolò Piccinino, and died shortly afterwards, not without suspicion of poison.
- ↑ The Sant’ Andrea and Last Supper have both disappeared.
- ↑ Among the many observations of the various writers rvho discuss the question of when oil-painting was first practised among the Italians, is one by Della Valle, who remarks on this passage, that “painting in oil could not have been new in Tuscany at that time, since there is an oil-painting in Siena with the following inscription;—Hoc opus Johannes Pauli de Senis, pinxit mccccxxx. Lettere Sanesi, 3, 54. To some of the numerous writers who treat on this subject, the reader has already been referred. See note, p. 58.
