Agostino Chigi, pleased with the art, and still more the whimsies of Soddoma, if we believe Vasari, carried him to Rome, and introduced him to Giulio II. to co-operate with Pietro Perugino, &c. in the Vatican; but his labours being superseded by the novel powers of Raffaelle, Agostino, whose attachments were not regulated by the Pontiff's whims, employed him in the decorations of his own palace, now the Farnesina; where, in a principal apartment leading to the great saloon reserved for Raffaelle, he painted the Nuptials of Alexander and Roxana in a style no doubt inferior to the Loves of Amor and Psyche, but not of an inferiority sufficient to account for the enormous disparity of fame that separates both. Domenico Mecherino,[86] the son of a Sienese peasant, better known by the adopted name of Beccafumi, inferior to Razzi in elegance of line and suavity of colour, excelled him in energy of conception and style. Vasari, who invests Beccafumi with every excellence and virtue, of which the defect or opposite vice disgraced Razzi, still owns that he did not reach the physiognomic suavity that marks the faces of Soddoma; and after leading him from the scanty elements of Pietro Perugino to Rome, the Antique, the Chapel of M. Angelo, and the works of Raffaelle, by a kind of anticlimax brings him back to Siena to complete his studies by adopting the principles of Giannantonio. A modern writer,[87] on the contrary, has discovered that the talents of Domenico, overpowered by the genius of M. Angelo, turned their current awry, and failed to produce the legitimate efforts which might have been expected from a steady adherence to the principles of Raffaelle--opinions less founded on the character of the artist and the spirit of his works than on the partiality and prejudice of the critics. Beccafumi was not of the first class, less made to lead than to follow with an air of originality; to amalgamate principles not absolutely discordant--thus, in single figures, he sometimes more than imitates, he equals M. Angelo, as in those noticed by Bottari;--and again, in larger compositions, such as those on the pavement of the Cathedral, works by which he is chiefly known, we see him on the traces of Raffaelle, and emulating the variety and graces of Polydoro: these graces frequently vanished, and correctness as often ceased with the increased size of his figures: the foreshortenings, in which he delighted, savour more of the "sotto in su," introduced by Correggio to Upper Italy, than of the principles of M. Angelo; they are generally attended by a magic chiaroscuro, like that of the figure of Justice, on which Vasari expatiates, on the ceiling of the public hall at Siena, which, from profound darkness gradually rising into light, seems to vanish in celestial splendour. He is said by Vasari to have preferred fresco and distemper to oil paint, as a purer, simpler, and of course more durable medium; and though the predominant