Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 5.djvu/136

124 pictures, he being most of all in need of exertion, as having to provide himself with the means of life.

In the year 1529, as it did not appear to Francesco that he was doing any great good in the workshops of Brescia, he went, as did Nannoccio, to Andrea del Sarto, with whom they remained during all the time of the siege, but in the midst of such grievous privations, that they afterwards both repented the not having accompanied Giorgio, who spent that year at Pisa, and amused himself during four months by studying the art of the goldsmith, under the above-named Manno. Vasari subsequently repaired to Bologna; and this he did at the time when Charles V. was there crowned Emperor by Pope Clement VII. About the same period, Francesco, who had remained in Florence, painted on a small panel a votive picture for a soldier who had made his vow thereof at a moment when, being in his bed, he had been attacked by other soldiers who designed to kill him. The work was a thing of no moment, but Francesco had studied it most carefully, and finished it to perfection: this picture fell into the hands of Giorgio Vasari not many years ago, when the latter presented it to the reverend Don Vincenzio Borghini, director to the Hospital of the Innocents, by whom it is very highly valued.

For the Black Friars of the Badia, Francesco painted three small pictures in a Tabernacle of the Sacrament, which had been made by the wood-carver Tasso, in the manner of a Triumphal Arch. The subject of one of these little stories was the Sacrifice of Abraham; that of the Second was the Fall of the Manna; and of the Third, the Hebrews eating the Paschal Lamb on the eve of their departure from Egypt; these works were executed in such a manner that they gave a foretaste of what Francesco was afterwards to become.* He subsequently painted a picture of Dalilah cutting off the hair of Sampson, for Francesco Sertini, by whom the work was sent into France; in the background of this painting is seen the same Sampson, when, casting his arms around the