Vasari thus comments upon Bernardino: "Some are helped by fortune, without being much endowed by merit; ... one knows that Fortune has sons who depend on her help without any virtue of their own, and she is pleased that they should owe their exaltation to her favour, when they would never have been known for their own merit."[3] But Vasari evidently knew nothing of the good or bad fortune of Pintoricchio's early days, and was merely balancing his own estimate of the artist against the consideration he received in later years. [3] Vasari, iii. p. 493. Natural bent and circumstance combined to form Bernardino Betti into an Umbrian of the Umbrians, placing him on the less powerful but more indigenous side of the sharply-divided line which ran through the artistic life of the country. There is sufficient suggestion of Benedetto Bonfigli in some of his work, to make it probable that he joined the school which Bonfigli had established in Perugia in the early part of the fifteenth century. Vasari speaks of him as an assistant and friend of the older master. Here he would have been brought into close contact with Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, who must have been considerably the senior of Pintoricchio, as he was undertaking important commissions as early as 1472.[4] It is this master whose influence is most strongly stamped upon him. Afterwards, as we shall see, he constantly transferred figures from Fiorenzo's panels to his own, while in the older man's compositions we can pick out others which have more of Pintoricchio than Fiorenzo; but the latter, though full of originality and attraction as he is, never advances beyond a certain point, and always retains something of the archaic. [4] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, iii. 153. It is in 1482 that Bernardino first emerges from the realm of conjecture, and appears, forming part of that brilliant group which was gathered together in Rome to decorate the walls of Sixtus IV.'s newly-built chapel.