When Andrea died in 1531, “full of glory and domestic trials,” as Vasari recounts, the normal development of Florentine painting ended, and Florence had already seen her artistic star dimmed by the rising splendors of Venice and Rome. Artistically she became a city of wit and ingenuity, chronicling and criticizing art rather than producing it. Moreover the obsession of Michelangelo’s sublimity worked havoc with his dilettante imitators. Some of these have the grace of lucidity, like Agnolo Bronzino, who (1502–1572)[59] practiced a reactionary sort of portraiture based on the old tradition of tempera painting. In sheer beauty of surface, enamel one is tempted to call it, he is little inferior to his great German contemporary, Hans Holbein, and his sense of character is only less keen because less individual. In the haughty patricians surrounding the person of Cosimo, the first grandduke, he found congenial sitters, Figure 163. In the narrow field of portraiture he is nearly in the first rank, while in his rare mythologies and religious pictures his limitations appear painfully. He was a vicious person, a cold æsthete, with few of the generous virtues that nourish the soul. Yet in his flinty way he was quite perfect, and as one of the first professionally unmoral artists he cannot be neglected by the psychological critic. [Illustration: FIG. 164. Pontormo. The Deposition.—_S. Felice._ ] A more appealing figure is his master, Jacopo Carrucci, called from his birthplace Il Pontormo.[60] His was a tender and deeply religious spirit with the poet’s capacity for elation and melancholy. In his altar-pieces, such as the Deposition, Figure 164, at San Felice he seeks and achieves a positive pathos. Influenced by Michelangelo’s sublimity, he converts it to more specific and psychological ends. Often he is restless and over-emphatic as in the frescoes of the Passion in the cloister of the Florentine Certosa, or in the strangely complicated and contorted little picture of the Martyrdom of St. Mauritius and his Legionaries, in the Uffizi. In such work he moves towards the absolute expressionism of an El Greco, preluding also the more conventional emotionalism of the Baroque. As a portraitist he had no equal at Florence except his pupil Bronzino. Often the sensitiveness and moodiness of his characterizations recall his Venetic contemporary, Lorenzo Lotto. Even when he is robust he is sensitively psychological, as in the superb portrait of a Halberdier, Figure 165. Above all he was a powerful and subtle draughtsman whether with pen or chalk. His line writhes in a fashion at times sinister, at times singularly blithe, and his figure sketches have something of the imaginative thrill of the figure studies of Blake. For the grandducal palace of Poggio a Cajano, Figure 166, he did in a huge lunette pierced by a great round window a most original decoration for the odd triangles at the base. The unconventional fields are filled each by a rather small figure