Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/331

1521] served, and give us a high idea of his skill in the delineation of character. There is the dark-eyed warrior in gleaming armour of the National Gallery, with the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio and Piazza della Signoria behind him, and the Florentine matron with her pet rabbit in her lap, in the Jarves Collection in the United States. There are the portraits of his own intimate friends, Giuliano di San Gallo and his father, which Vasari describes, and which Signor Frizzoni discovered at the Hague, the one holding a pair of compasses, the other a sheet of paper in his hands. And there is Caterina Sforza, the heroic Madonna who held the citadel of Forli against Cæsar Borgia and the combined French and papal armies, and who came to end her days in the home of her Medici husband.

As a young man, Piero di Cosimo frequently devoted his talents to the preparation of the carnival pageants and masquerades in which the Florentines took delight, and the Medici were glad to avail themselves of his inventive powers in the festas with which they amused the people. At the Carnival of 1511, his weird fancy found expression in a triumphal car of Death, which paraded the streets drawn by black buffaloes, and escorted by a corps of horsemen in black, bearing sable banners and chanting the Miserere. This gruesome fantasy, as Vasari afterwards heard from Piero's pupil, Andrea del Sarto, was intended to be a secret prophecy of the return of the Medici, and was accordingly warmly applauded by their partisans, as if it were "a resurrection from death to life."

From his youth Piero di Cosimo had been a way-