This artist demonstrates the ascendancy of native genius over precept. When a boy he was put under the tuition of Giovanni Barile, a good carver in wood, employed on the ceilings and doors of the Vatican, after the designs of Raffaello, but a painter of no celebrity. While still a youth, he was consigned to Pier di Cosimo, a practical colourist, but by no means skilled in drawing or in composition: hence the taste of Andrea in these arts was formed on the cartoons of Vinci and Bonarruoti; and, as many circumstances indicate, on the frescos of Masaccio and of Ghirlandaio, in which the subjects were more suited to his mild disposition. He went to Rome, but I know not in what year; that he was there, appears not to me to admit of dispute, as in the case of Correggio. I do not argue this from his style approaching near to that of Raffaello, as it appeared also to Lomazzo and other writers, though with less of ideal beauty. Raffaello and Andrea had studied the same originals at Florence; and nature might have given them corresponding ideas for the selection of the beautiful. I ground my opinion entirely on Vasari. He informs us, that Andrea was at Rome, that seeing the works of the scholars of Raffaello, timidity induced him to despair of equalling them, and to return speedily to Florence. If we credit so many other stories of the pusillanimity of Andrea, why should we reject this? or what faith shall we give to Vasari, if he was erroneous in a circumstance relating to one who was his master, and which was written in Florence soon after the death of Andrea, while his scholars, his friends, and even his wife, were still living, an assertion, too, uncontradicted in the second edition, in which Vasari retracted so much of what he had affirmed in the first?