A few steps farther on the left, towards the Fiesole heights, which we can see rising at the end of the street, we come, at No. 69, to a little doorway which leads to a little courtyard—­the Chiostro dello Scalzo—­decorated with frescoes by Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio and containing the earliest work of both artists.  The frescoes are in monochrome, which is very unusual, but their interest is not impaired thereby:  one does not miss other colours.  No. 7, the Baptism of Christ, is the first fresco these two associates ever did; and several years elapsed between that and the best that are here, such as the group representing Charity and the figure of Faith, for the work was long interrupted.  The boys on the staircase in the fresco which shows S. John leaving his father’s house are very much alive.  This is by Franciabigio, as is also S. John meeting with Christ, a very charming scene.  Andrea’s best and latest is the Birth of the Baptist, which has the fine figure of Zacharias writing in it.  But what he should be writing at that time and place one cannot imagine:  more reasonably might he be called a physician preparing a prescription.  On the wall is a terra-cotta bust of S. Antonio, making him much younger than is usual.

Andrea’s suave brush we find all over Florence, both in fresco and picture, and this is an excellent place to say something of the man of whom English people have perhaps a more intimate impression than of any other of the old masters, by reason largely of Browning’s poem and not a little by that beautiful portrait which for so long was erroneously considered to represent the painter himself, in our National Gallery.  Andrea’s life was not very happy.  No painter had more honour in his own day, and none had a greater number of pupils, but these stopped with him only a short time, owing to the demeanour towards them of Andrea’s wife, who developed into a flirt and shrew, dowered with a thousand jealousies.  Andrea, the son of a tailor, was born in 1486 and apprenticed to a goldsmith.  Showing, however, more drawing than designing ability, he was transferred to a painter named Barile and then passed to that curious man of genius who painted the fascinating picture “The Death of Procris” which hangs near Andrea’s portrait in our National Gallery—­Piero di Cosimo.  Piero carried oddity to strange lengths.  He lived alone in indescribable dirt, and lived wholly on hard-boiled eggs, which he cooked, with his glue, by the fifty, and ate as he felt inclined.  He forbade all pruning of trees as an act of insubordination to Nature, and delighted in rain but cowered in terror from thunder and lightning.  He peered curiously at clouds to find strange shapes in them, and in his pursuit of the grotesque examined the spittle of sick persons on the walls or ground, hoping for suggestions of monsters, combats of horses, or fantastic landscapes.  But why this should have been thought madness in Cosimo when Leonardo in his directions to artists explicitly advises them