"Michael Angelo, to oblige his intimate friend Bartolomeo Bettini, made him a Cartoon of Venus naked and Cupid kissing her, to be executed by Puntormo in oil, for the centre piece of an apartment, on the sides of which Bronzino had begun to paint Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, to be followed by the rest of Tuscan love-songsters. The picture of Puntormo was miraculous, but instead of being given to Bettini for the price stipulated, was, by some favour-hunters, his enemies, nearly extorted from Jacopo, and carried off as a present to Duke Alessandro, returning the cartoon to Bettini. A transaction which, when he heard it, irritated Michael Angelo, who loved his friend, and made him dislike Jacopo for it."--Vasari, Vita di Jacopo da, P.V. [83] They had been fellow-scholars in the garden of Lorenzo de' Medici. SCHOOL OF SIENA. In the enumeration of Tuscan art, some lovers of subdivision have fancied, with more refinement than solidity, to discover in the style of Sienese artists a characteristic sufficiently distinct from the Florentine, to erect Siena into a school. This characteristic, we are told, is a peculiar gaiety in the selection of colour, and an air of physiognomic vivacity and serenity of face; both, it seems, the inheritance of the Sienese race. They have, accordingly, divided this school into three epochs: the first is that of the _ancients_ (gli antichi); and its first palpable patriarch, Guido, or Guidone, commonly called _Guido da Siena_, and noticed already in the beginning of our chapter on the Florentine school. He flourished before the birth of Cimabue, in the first half of the thirteenth century, and is followed by the names of Ugolino da Siena and Duccio surnamed di Boninsegna, the precursors of Simone Memmi, the contemporary of Giotto, who painted Laura and survives in the sonnets of her lover. Lippo Memmi and Cecco da Martino, his relatives, float in the obscurity which prevailed till the appearance of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti. Of the first there still exists an extensive work in the public palace, or rather a didactic poem, which in suitable allegories and in varied views, exhibits the vices of a bad government, and personifies the qualities necessary to form the rulers of a virtuous republic--a work which, with less monotony of features, and more judgment in the division of the subjects, would, in the opinion of Lanzi, find little to envy in the best-treated histories of Pisa's Campo Santo. In partnership with his brother Pietro, he painted, in the Hospital of Siena, the Presentation and the Espousal of the Madonna--pictures destroyed in 1720. This is that Pietro who, in the Campo Santo of Pisa, painted the Hermits of the Desert, and the Terrors of Solitude invaded by an Infernal Apparition, with a novelty of conception and a richness of fancy, that render his work the most interesting of the whole series. That, notwithstanding the plague, which