He now paid his last visit to Rome: Pope Julius II. had summoned him, together with Perugino, Signorelli, and others, to consider the decoration of the Vatican rooms. Giambattista Caporali, the historian, speaks of a supper at which they were all present at the house of Bramante. Their host was the man who had introduced young Raphael to the Pope, and Pintoricchio, among the rest, had the mortification of seeing himself superseded in the city where he had been foremost a few years earlier. He and Signorelli returned to Siena together, and the master of Cortona stood sponsor to the child born in January 1509. In October, Pintoricchio had sold a house in the third ward of the city to Pandolfo Petrucci for 420 florins. He was in close contact at this time with that great merchant prince, and was employed with Signorelli on Petrucci's new palace, where he painted the frescoes, of which one, the "Return of Ulysses," in the National Gallery, is all that remains. We find him buying land in Siena and selling it in Perugia, making his will, and arranging his affairs. In the last year of his life he painted that brilliant and tender little picture of "Christ bearing the Cross," now in the Borromeo Palace at Milan. He was suspicious and unhappy about his wife's behaviour, and a fresh will was made, to which a codicil was added in September and another in October. In the first he deprived her of some of the money he had already left her, but he returned it in the last addition. Vasari's story of the cause of his death, which took place December 11th, 1513, can be nothing but a fable. He tells us that Pintoricchio was executing some work for the Fathers of San Francesco, and being hampered by a heavy bureau in the room assigned to him, insisted on having it moved. In the transit it broke open, and a treasure of gold was discovered in the secret drawer, so much to the chagrin of the painter that he never held up his head again. The friends who knew the painter in Siena do not allude to any such occurrence; and the popular master, entrusted with more commissions than he could execute, well paid and honoured by all men, was not likely to be upset by the sight of some gold coins, even if he could persuade himself that he had any right to them. The real circumstances of his death were sadder, if less sensational. Sigismondo Tizio, a Sienese historian, writer of a mass of almost unedited matter, who was his attached friend and his neighbour in the parish of San Vincenzo and Sant' Anastasia, has left a record of his last illness, in which he accuses his wife Grania of causing his death by her neglect. Tizio says that she went about with her lover, Girolamo di Paolo, nicknamed il Paffo, a soldier of the Piazza at Siena, and that Bernardino was shut up and left to die of starvation; that some women heard his cries and went to his assistance, and that it was from them that Tizio afterwards learned these particulars. From Tizio's way of