In the studio Piero was industrious and steady, working earnestly, whether he was assisting his master's designs or carrying out his own fancies of monsters, old myths, and classic fairy stories. No doubt the two boys, Mariotto and Baccio, found little companionship in this abstracted young man always dreaming over his own ideas. If they told him an anecdote, he would look up vacantly at the end not having heard a word; at other times every little noise or burst of laughter would annoy him, and he would be immoderately angry with the flies and mosquitos.
Piero had already been to Rome, and had assisted Cosimo in his fresco of Christ preaching on Lake Tiberias; indeed most judges thought his landscape the best part of that work, and the talent he showed obtained him several commissions. He took the portraits of Virginio Orsini, Ruberto Sanseverino and Duke Valentino, son of Pope Alessandro VI. He was much esteemed as a portrait painter also in Florence, and from his love of classical subjects, and extreme finish of execution, he ranked as one of the best painters of "cassoni," or bridal-linen chests.
This fashion excited the indignation of Savonarola, who in one of his sermons exclaimed, "Do not let your daughters prepare their 'corredo' (trousseau) in a chest with pagan paintings; is it right for a Christian spouse to be familiar with Venus before the Virgin, or Mars before the saints?"
Thus Piero being a finished painter, was often Cosimo Roselli's substitute in the instruction of the two boys, for Cosimo having come home from Rome with some money, lived at his ease; but still continued to paint frescoes in company with Piero.
Another pupil was Andrea di Cosimo, whose peculiar branch of art was that of the grotesque. He no doubt drew designs for friezes and fountains, for architraves and door mouldings, in which distorted faces look out from all kinds of writhing scrolls; and lizards, dragons, snakes, and creeping plants, mingle according to the artist's fancy. Andrea was however often employed in more serious work, as the records of the Servite Convent prove, for they contain the note of payment to him, in 1510, for the curtains of the altarpiece which Filippino Lippi had painted. These curtains were till lately attributed to Andrea del Sarto, or Francia Bigio.
This is the Andrea Feltrini mentioned by Crowe and Cavalcaselle as working in the cloister of the Servi with Andrea del Sarto and Francia Bigio between 1509 and 1514.[Footnote: History of Painting, vol. iii. chap. xvii. p. 546.]
But Baccio's dearest friend in the studio was a boy nearly his own age, Mariotto Albertinelli, son of Biagio di Bindo, born October 13, 1474. He had experienced the common lot of young artists in those days, and had been apprenticed to a gold-beater, but preferred the profession of painter. From the first these two lads, being thrown almost entirely together in the work of the studio, formed one of those pure, lasting friendships, of which so many exist in the annals of art, and so few in the material world. They helped each other in the drudgery, and enjoyed their higher studies together; but they did not draw all their inspirations from the over-coloured works of Cosimo—although Mariotto once reproduced his red-winged cherubim in after life [Footnote: In the 'Trinity' in the Belle Arti, Florence.]—nor from the hard and laboured myths of Piero.
They went to higher founts, for scarcely a trace of these early influences are to be found in their paintings. Vasari says they studied the Cose di Leonardo. The great artist had at this time left the studio of Verocchio, and was fast rising into fame in Florence, so it is most probable that two youths with strong artistic tendencies would study, not only the sketches, but also the precepts, of the great man. Besides this there were two national art-schools open to students in Florence: these were the frescoes of Masaccio and Lippi in the Carmine, and the Medicean garden in the Via Cavour, then called Via Larga.