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Updated: May 17, 2025
Then, having grown weary of living at Volterra and in the house of that nobleman, as one who was accustomed to being free, he departed and went off to Pisa, where, at the instance of Battista del Cervelliera, he executed two pictures for Messer Bastiano della Seta, the Warden of Works of the Duomo, which were placed in the recess behind the high-altar of that Duomo, beside those of Sogliani and Beccafumi.
Both Beccafumi and Peruzzi felt the cold and manneristic Roman style of rhetoric injuriously. To mention the remaining schools of Italy in detail would be superfluous. True art still flourished at Ferrara, where Garofalo endeavoured to carry on the Roman manner of Raphael without the necessary strength or ideality, but also without the soulless insincerity of the mannerists.
On one side of the altar, the Angel Gabriel floating in very majestic and angelic; on the other side the Virgin Annunziata, with that attitude and expression so characteristic of the Siena School, as if shrinking from the apparition. These also are by Girolamo del Pacchio, and extremely fine. The enthroned Virgin and Child, by Beccafumi.
Giovanni Antonio carried it on to such purpose that he painted four altar-pieces: but these, at a later date, appeared to Sebastiano della Seta, the new Warden, to be all in the same manner, and somewhat less beautiful than the first, and he allotted to Domenico Beccafumi of Siena after proving his worth from some pictures that he painted round the sacristy, which are very beautiful an altar-piece which he executed in Pisa.
But Marrina, with his doors of the library; Barili, with his marvelous casing of the choir-stalls; Beccafumi, with his bronze and neillo these are the artists whom one wonders at; these wood-carvers and bronze-founders, creators of the microcosmic detail of the Renaissance which had at last burst triumphantly into Siena.
That same quality, the pure gift of nature, which has been seen in Giotto and in some others among those painters of whom we have spoken hitherto, has been revealed most recently in Domenico Beccafumi, the painter of Siena, in that he, while guarding some sheep for his father Pacio, the labourer of the Sienese citizen Lorenzo Beccafumi, was observed to practise his hand by himself, child as he was, in drawing sometimes on stones and sometimes in other ways.
Indeed, it may be said that Pacchia's paintings in the Oratory of S. Bernardino, though they lacked his siren beauty, are more powerfully composed; while Peruzzi's fresco of "Augustus and the Sibyl," in the church of Fontegiusta, has a monumental dignity unknown to Sodoma. Beccafumi is apt to leave the spectator of his paintings cold.
In this work Pordenone also took a part, as I said in his Life, and likewise Domenico Beccafumi of Siena, a very rare painter, who showed that he was not inferior to any of the others, although the works by his hand that are in Siena are the most excellent among the vast number that he painted.
In the Company of S. Bernardino of Siena, beside the Church of S. Francesco, he executed some scenes in fresco in competition with Girolamo del Pacchia, a Sienese painter, and Domenico Beccafumi namely, the Presentation of Our Lady in the Temple, when she goes to visit S. Elizabeth, her Assumption, and when she is crowned in Heaven.
We wander from point to point, we finger and caress the lustrous stalls of Barili, and turn with a kind of confusion of vision from panel to panel; above our heads the tabernacle of Vecchietta, the lamp bearing angels of Beccafumi make spots of bituminous color, with glittering high-lights, strangely emphasizing their modeling; from these youths, who might be pages to some Roman prefect, the eye travels upward still further, along the golden convolutions of the heavily stuccoed pilasters to the huge, gilded cherubs' heads that frame the eastern rose....
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