"Do you suppose it is true that his wife, Lucrezia, used to come here after he was dead and she was an old woman, to look at the pictures?" asked Margery one morning, when they had found their favorite place.
"I think it would be just like her vanity to point out her own likeness to people who were copying or looking at the frescoes, according to the old story," answered Bettina, with a disapproving shake of the head.
"Well," said Barbara, "the faces and figures and draperies are all lovely. But I suppose it is true, as Mr. Sumner says, that Andrea del Sarto did not try to make the faces show any holy feeling, or indeed any very noble expression, so that they are not so great pictures as they would have been had he been high-minded enough to do such things."
"It is a shame to have a man's life and work harmed by a woman, even though she was his wife," said Malcom, emphatically.
"All the more that she was his wife," said Barbara. "But I do not believe he could have done much better without Lucrezia. I think his very love for such a woman shows a weakness in his character. It would have been better if he had chosen other than sacred subjects, would it not, Howard?"
They were quite at home in their study of these more modern pictures, with photographs of which they were already somewhat familiar. Howard, especially, had always had a fine and critical taste regarding art matters, and now, among the works of artists of whom he knew something, was a valuable member of the little coterie, and often appealed to when Mr. Sumner was absent.
And thus they had talked over and over again the impressions which each artist and his work made on them, until even Mr. Sumner was astonished and delighted at the evident result of the interest he had awakened.
But the chief man and artist they were now considering, was Michael Angelo; and the more they learned of him the more true it was, they thought, that he "filled all Florence." They eagerly followed every step of his life from the time when, a young lad, he entered Ghirlandajo's studio, until he was brought to Florence—a dead old man, concealed in a bale of merchandise, because the authorities refused permission to his friends to take his body from Rome—and was buried at midnight in Santa Croce.
They tried to imagine his life during the four years which he spent in the Medici Palace, now Palazzo Riccardi, under the patronage of Lorenzo the Magnificent, while he was studying with the same tremendous energy that marked all his life, going almost daily to the Brancacci Chapel to learn from Masaccio's frescoes, and plunging into the subject of anatomy more like a devotee than a student.
They learned of his visit to Rome, where, before he was twenty-five years old, he sculptured the grand Pietá, or Dead Christ, which is still in St. Peter's; and of his return to Florence, where he foresaw his David in the shapeless block of marble, and gained permission of the commissioners to hew it out,—the David which stood so long under the shadow of old gray Palazzo Vecchio, but is now in the Academy.