Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/348

298 and while staying with his humble kinsfolk in this place, received a pressing invitation from King Francis I. to visit his court. He promised to consider the subject, but was detained in Florence for the present by work for his own convent. His presence was particularly required that winter, as Pope Leo X. came to Florence; and when, at the prayer of the friars of San Marco, he issued a decree for the canonization of S. Antonino, Fra Bartolommeo commemorated the event by painting the little picture of the burial of the good Archbishop, which is now at Panshanger. The Pope was known to be a great admirer of Fra Bartolommeo's work, and when, in 1512, he visited Florence, Prior Pagnini had presented him with one of the painter's most charming works—the dainty little Nativity in the Mond Collection. A Madonna in Sir Frederick Cook's collection, and the lovely Holy Family, of the Corsini Palace, a gem of pure colour and miniature-like finish, which was painted for that well-known patron of art, Angelo Doni, both bear the date of 1516. Another wealthy merchant, Salvatore Billi, employed the friar to paint the large Salvator Mundi, of the Pitti, and the figures of the prophets Job and Isaiah, in the Uffizi, for his chapel in the Annunziata. This altarpiece was bought early in the next century by Cardinal Carlo de' Medici, after whose death, in 1663, it was removed to the Pitti and divided into separate portions. The Assumption, at Naples, was also painted in 1516, for a church at Prato, while the Presentation, in the Vienna Gallery, was painted for the Chapel of the Novices in San Marco, where it remained for more than two hundred years. Last of