Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/372

320 every Virgin and Saint of Andrea's pictures, who sat to him for the youthful king in the fresco of the Magi, and appears again as one of the chief figures in the Birth of the Virgin, whom we see by turn as the Madonna on her throne, as the kneeling Magdalene of the Disputa, or the Charity of the Scalzo, was the wife of Carlo di Recanati, a hatter in the Via S. Gallo. Andrea was fascinated by her charms in the early days when he painted his first frescoes in the Annunziata, and after the death of her husband on the 17th of September, 1516, took her for his wife. But the fulfilment of his long-cherished desire brought him little peace. Lucrezia's violent and overbearing temper drove away his favourite scholar, Pontormo, who was alive when Vasari wrote, and several of his best apprentices, while her vanity excited his jealousy and her extravagance involved him in constant difficulties. He soon found that he had not only his wife, but her father and sisters, to keep, and in order to provide for their needs, was compelled to lead a life of incessant toil, and to neglect his own parents, who, if we are to believe Vasari's tale, died in miserable poverty. It is certain, however, that Lucrezia herself possessed some fortune, and before Andrea went to France he gave her father a receipt for her dowry of 150 florins, and deposited a sum of money for her benefit in the bank of S. Maria Nuova.

In May, 1518, he accepted a pressing invitation from the French king, who had been greatly impressed by two of his works, the Holy Family of the Louvre and a Pietà, now at Vienna, which had been sent to France by Giovanni Battista della Palla. Andrea found a generous patron in Francis I.,