Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 3.djvu/352

344 forward compelled to accept any kind of work that he could get.

Francia also taught his art to a youth called Visino, who, from what we see of him, seems likely to have become a very excellent master if he had not died young, as it was his fate to do. Francia Bigio had besides many other disciples, of whom I do not propose to make further mention. He was interred by the Brotherhood of San Giobbe in the church of San Brancazio, which is opposite to the house wherein he had dwelt. His death caused great regret to all good artists, seeing that he had been an able and ingenious master, and had ever shown himself to be a very diffident and upright man.

The painter, Morto da Feltro, was a man of great eccentricity in his mode of life as well as of thinking, and equally singular was he in his inventions and in the arabesques which he executed, and which caused him to be very much esteemed. This artist repaired to Rome in early youth, and at the time when Pinturicchio was painting the papal apartments for Pope Alexander VI., with the Loggie and lower rooms in the great tower of the Castello Sant’ Angelo, as well as certain of the upper chambers therein. But Morto, who was of a melancholy temperament, was perpetually studying the antiquities around him, and when he found compartments of vaultings or ranges of walls decorated with grottesche or arabesques, these he studied with untiring pleasure, for in such things he ever took delight; and so perfectly did he acquire the ancient manner of treating foliage, so exactly did he copy the mode of turning the