Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/373

1531] for whom he painted the well-known group of Charity and her Children, and a portrait of the infant Dauphin, for which he received 300 gold crowns.

But while the master was enjoying the change from the narrowness and poverty of his Florentine life to the splendour of the French court, his wife became impatient for his return—"being more anxious," remarks Vasari, "to profit by his gains than to see him again." Her entreaties touched his heart so deeply, that he obtained leave from the king for two months, early in 1519, to go to Florence, and bring back his wife. But once at home again, Andrea forgot his promises in the joy of Lucrezia's company. He lavished presents upon his wife and her sisters, and spent the money which Francis I. had given him to purchase works of art for his palace at Fontainebleau, in buying a plot of land and building a house near the Annunziata. Whether Vasari's story is true or not, it is certain that Andrea never returned to France, and threw away the prospect of a great and honourable career in that country. But he found plenty of employment in Florence, where, now that Fra Bartolommeo was dead, he had no one left to be his rival. He soon resumed his work at the Scalzo cloister, and designed the beautiful Charity, in which he repeated his former composition in the Louvre, and once more painted Lucrezia's portrait. In 1521, his old friend Ottaviano de' Medici, employed him to decorate Leo the Tenth's villa at Poggio a Caiano, where his fresco of envoys in Florentine costume bringing a motley collection of giraffes, parrots, and monkeys as tribute to Cæsar