Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/336

288 eldest child, a boy named Bartolommeo, was born in 1475, and became known as Baccio della Porta. At nine years old he was placed, by the sculptor Benedetto da Majano's advice, in the bottega of Cosimo Rosselli, where he was employed to grind colours and sweep out the shop, and soon showed himself so capable and trustworthy that his master often sent him to receive payments. His sweet and gentle nature won the hearts of his companions, especially of another apprentice named Mariotto Albertinelli, who was about a year older, and who became his closest friend. "The two lads," says Vasari, "became, as it were, one body and soul." Yet from the first these young students were very different in their tastes. Baccio loved to study Masaccio's frescoes in the dim chapel of the Carmine, while Mariotto preferred to copy antiques in the Medici gardens. When Savonarola's preaching stirred all Florence to its depths, Baccio was daily to be found among the crowds in the Duomo who listened gladly to his words and wept over his pathetic appeals, while Mariotto joined the opposite faction of the Arrabbiati, and openly scoffed at the piagnoni. But the tie that bound the friends together was too strong to be lightly severed, and when, in 1492, the death of Baccio's father and step-mother left a family of young brothers dependent upon his exertions, he and Mariotto opened a shop together and began to accept commissions on their own account.

It is difficult to point with certainty to any pictures which Baccio executed at this early period, but the Madonna adoring the Child, in the Visconti-Venostà Collection in Milan, the "Noli me Tangere" in the