Among Del Sarto's followers it will be enough to mention Franciabigio, Vasari's favourite in fresco painting, Rosso de' Rossi, who carried the Florentine manner into France, and Pontormo, the masterly painter of portraits.[401] In the historical pictures of these men, whether sacred or secular, it is clear how much was done for Florentine art by Fra Bartolommeo and Del Sarto independently of Michael Angelo and Lionardo. Angelo Bronzino, the pupil of Pontormo, is chiefly valuable for his portraits. Hard and cold, yet obviously true to life, they form a gallery of great interest for the historian of Duke Cosimo's reign. His frescoes and allegories illustrate the defects that have been pointed out in those of Raphael's and Buonarroti's imitators.[402] Want of thought and feeling, combined with the presumptuous treatment of colossal and imaginative subjects, renders these compositions inexpressibly chilling. The psychologist, who may have read a poem from Bronzino's pen, will be inclined to wonder how far this barren art was not connected with personal corruption.[403] Such speculations are, however, apt to be misleading. Siena, after a long period of inactivity, received a fresh impulse at the same time as Florence. Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, or Razzi, called Il Sodoma, was born at Vercelli about 1477. He studied in his youth under Lionardo da Vinci, training his own exquisite sense of natural beauty in that scientific school. From Milan, after a certain interval of time, he removed to Rome, where he became a friend and follower of Raphael. These double influences determined a style that never lost its own originality. With what delicacy and _naïveté_, almost like a second Luini, but with more of humour and sensuousness, he approached historic themes, may be seen in his frescoes at Monte Oliveto.[404] They were executed before his Roman visit, and show the facility of a most graceful improvisatore. One painting representing the "Temptation of Monks by Dancing Women" carries the melody of fluent lines and the seduction of fair girlish faces into a region of pure poetry. These frescoes are superior to Sodoma's work in the Farnesina. Impressed, as all artists were, by the monumental character of Borne, and fired by Raphael's example, he tried to abandon his sketchy and idyllic style for one of greater majesty and fulness. The delicious freshness of his earlier manner was sacrificed; but his best efforts to produce a grandiose composition ended in a confusion of individually beautiful but ill-assorted motives. Like Luini, Sodoma was never successful in pictures requiring combination and arrangement. He lacked some sense of symmetry and sought to achieve massiveness by crowding figures in a given space. When we compare his group of "S. Catherine Fainting under the Stigmata" with the medley of agitated forms that make up his picture of the same saint at Tuldo's execution, we see plainly that