With the opening of the Cinquecento, Siena grew dissatisfied with the antiquated methods of her native artists. Three mediocre painters, indeed, carried on their traditional manner well into the sixteenth century: Bernardino Fungai (1460-1516), Girolamo di Benvenuto (1470-1524), the son of Benvenuto di Giovanni, and Giacomo Pacchiarotti (1474-1540), Fungai's pupil, a turbulent fellow, whose pusillanimous, half-crazy attempts to pose as a political revolutionary are immortalised in a _novella_ by Pietro Fortini and a poem by Robert Browning. But in the meanwhile, better masters had been brought to Siena from other cities; Luca Signorelli and his pupil, Girolamo Genga, from Cortona and Urbino, had come to decorate the palace of the Magnifico; Bernardino Pinturicchio of Perugia had been hired by the Piccolomini, and his great fellow-citizen, Pietro Perugino, was painting altarpieces for Sant'Agostino and San Francesco. And, greater than any of these, there came one whom Siena made her own: Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477-1549), presently to be known as Sodoma. The son of an artisan of Vercelli, Bazzi had gone to Milan and fallen under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci, though it is doubtful whether he actually became his pupil. In 1501 certain merchants, agents of the Spannocchi, brought the young man to Siena, with which city--save for the short period from 1508 to 1510, when he worked in Rome mainly for the rich Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi--he was henceforth associated. Morelli regarded Bazzi as "the most important and gifted artist of the school of Leonardo--the one who is most easily confounded with the great master himself." Frequently careless and very unequal in his execution, the exquisite beauty of his women's faces can hardly be surpassed; and "in his best moments, when he brought all his powers into play, Sodoma produced works which are worthy to rank with the most perfect examples of Italian art."[66] He was a wild and reckless fellow enough in his life, passionately addicted to horse-racing, and a lover of strange beasts and birds. Of these latter he kept a whole collection round him, great and small of every kind that he could get, until, in Vasari's phrase, "his house seemed verily to be the Ark of Noah." In a list of his goods which Bazzi drew up for taxation in 1531, eight race-horses and a number of these other creatures are set down, and the catalogue ends--may my fair readers pardon me the quotation!--with "tre bestiacce cattive, che son tre donne." [Illustration: _Bastion outside Porta Pispini erected by Baldassare Peruzzi_]