During the six years of this prince’s brief reign Mantegna was chiefly employed in painting halls at the villas of Marmirolo and Gonzaga, which have long since shared the common ruin of the summer palaces round Mantua. His fame was now at its height. “The virtue of Andrea,” wrote the Marquis Federico, “is known to the whole world;” and in 1483 Lorenzo de’ Medici stopped at Mantua to visit our painter’s house and renowned collection of antiquities. Other sovereigns sent him pressing invitations, and all were desirous of having a work by Mantegna’s hand; but the great man was capricious, and refused most of these solicitations. Federico himself had to make his painter’s excuses in an elaborate epistle to the Duchess of Milan, whose portrait Andrea flatly refused to undertake. There was no help for it, and the disappointed lady had to rest satisfied with Federico’s explanation, that since these excellent masters were so full of fancies we must be content with what they choose to give us. But when Federico’s early death in 1484 left the rule of his principality to a mere child, Andrea, filled with anxiety for the future, and still heavily burdened with debt, began to look around him for another patron. His thoughts naturally turned to the illustrious patron of the fine arts who had recently visited his studio, and he appealed to Lorenzo de’ Medici in a pathetic letter, bewailing the losses he had sustained in the successive deaths of two generous masters, and begging to be employed, if perchance he should have any talent likely to please so magnificent a prince. What answer Lorenzo returned to this entreaty we do not learn, but he probably gave him a commission before long, since we know that it was for him Andrea painted the beautiful little Virgin of the Uffizi, which, with the master’s habitual slowness, he did not finish until the close of his visit to Rome. This little gem remains a precious memorial of the intercourse between two of the most interesting personalities of the Renaissance, and few of Andrea’s conceptions are sweeter than the blue-draped Mother gazing with drooping eyelids on the Child whom she rocks to sleep in her arms, while the peasants are seen at work in the field beyond and a band of herdsmen drive their flocks up the steep hill-side path.