Ridolfo was the only one who chose the family profession, and he became the fourth painter of the name of Ghirlandajo. Davide was not a perfect artist, although a good mosaicist, as his works in the cathedrals of Orvieto, Siena, and Florence show, but he was for many years Ridolfo's only instructor. As the boy grew up Ridolfo frequented those public schools of art before spoken of, the Brancacci Chapel, and the study of the cartoons in the Papal Hall. Here he secured the friendship not only of Granacci and Pier di Cosimo, but of Raphael himself, with whom he visited Fra Bartolommeo in his convent. Raphael permitted Ridolfo to assist him in a Madonna for Siena, and tried to persuade him to accompany him to Rome; but Ridolfo, like a true Florentine, declined to go "beyond sight of the Duomo." His first great picture was done in 1504 for the church of San Gallo. The subject was _Christ Searing His Cross_. His uncle Benedetto had laboured on a similar picture, now in the Louvre, but Ridolfo's is a great improvement on this; the composition is well balanced, full of force and animation, the weeping figures of the Maries and the solicitude of S. Veronica are very lifelike, although he has not entirely abolished his uncle's coarseness in the scowling, low-typed men. The Christ and the Virgin are, on the contrary, so refined as to induce the supposition that this force of contrast was intentional; the landscape is rather hard and crude in tone, the flesh tints smooth, and the handling similar to that of Credi. The original is now in Palazzo Antinori, Florence, but a replica, in which he was assisted by Michele, his favourite pupil and adopted son, is in Santo Spirito. Vasari speaks of a _Nativity_, painted for the Cistercian monks of Cestello; a beautiful composition, in which the Madonna adores the holy child, S. Joseph standing near her; S. Francis and S. Jerome kneel in adoration; the landscape was sketched from the hills near "La Vernia," where S. Francis received the stigmata. Maselli says the picture was lost when the monastery changed hands, but Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle [Footnote: History of fainting, vol. in. chap. xvi. pp. 523, 524.] believe they have found it in the Hermitage at S. Petersburg, under Granacci's name. It is possible that the favourite pupil of his father and Ridolfo's own friend may have assisted him. The landscape is Raphaelesque, and might mark the time when that master and Fra Bartolommeo influenced his style. His best manner approached so nearly to that of the Frate, that had he continued he would have very nearly rivalled his excellence.