Giovanni Sanzi of Urbino--His son the immortal Raffaele--Early influences on his mind--Paints at Perugia, Città di Castello, Siena, and Florence--His visits to Urbino, and works there. With GIOVANNI SANZI[*161] we have already made acquaintance as an epic poet. The patient labour of the Abbé Pungeleoni, and the critical acumen of Passavant, have amply refuted Malvasia's spiteful, and Lanzi's careless but often quoted assertions, that the father of Raffaele was an obscure potter, or, at best, an indifferent artist, from whom his son could learn little.[162] Those only who have traced out his pictures in the remote townships and villages of his native duchy, and who estimate his works by coeval productions, can appreciate his real merits. Giovanni Sanzi was of a humble family in the village of Colbordolo, a few miles east of Urbino, for whose fictitious ancestry of artists there has been substituted by his painstaking but most puzzle-headed eulogist, a pedigree of peasantry from the middle of the fourteenth century. The son of one Sante, he assumed the patronymic Santi or Sanzi, which was subsequently euphonised by Bembo for his son into Sanzio. His grandfather Peruzuolo, after his losses by the Malatesta forays already alluded to,[163] had sold the petty holdings he possessed at Colbordolo, and removed his family to Urbino, where Sante became a retail dealer in various wares, and where he seems to have died in easy circumstances in 1485, nine years before his son. The inquiries of Pungeleoni have failed to ascertain the time of Giovanni's birth, but it was probably to these losses that the poet thus touchingly alludes, in his dedication,[164] as the impulse under which he became a painter:--"It would be tedious to relate the many straits and headlong precipices through which I have steered my life since fate devoured in flames my paternal nest, wherein was consumed all our substance; but arriving at the age when perhaps inclination would have led me to some more useful exercise of talent, of the many lines by which I might have gained a living, I devoted myself to the marvellous art of painting, which indeed (in addition to the round of domestic cares, of all human concerns the most ceaseless torment) imposes a burden heavy even to the shoulders of Atlas, and in which distinguished profession I blush not to be enrolled." Neither are we enabled to throw any light upon the lessons to which Giovanni resorted for instruction in the calling which he thus, at some sacrifice of material interests, had adopted. The catalogue of contemporary artificers introduced into his Chronicle, including all that was eminent from Gentile da Fabriano to Leonardo da Vinci, shows a most extensive acquaintance with their respective styles, as well as their names.[165] Mantegna is one of them whom he specially extols; there is, however, no similarity between their productions. Yet, though we know nothing of Sanzi's artistic education, the