Florence to the Governor of Milan, the date of which does not appear, he speaks of having almost brought to a conclusion[1]. At Florence he continued from 1503 to 1507[2], and in the course of that time painted, among other pictures of less note, a Virgin and Child, once in the hands of the Botti family; and a Baptist’s head, formerly in those of Camillo Albizzi[3]; but in 1508, and the succeeding year, he was at Milan, where he received a pension which had been granted him by Lewis XII. [4]; and in the month of September 1513, he, in company with his scholar Francesco Melzi, quitted Milan[5], and set out for Rome (which till that time he had never visited), encouraged perhaps to this resolution by the circumstance that his friend Cardinal John de Medicis, who was afterwards known by the assumed name of Leo X. had a few months before been advanced to the papacy[6]. His known partiality to the arts, and the friendship which had subsisted between him and Leonardo, held out to the latter a well-founded expectation of employment for his pencil at Rome, and we find in this expectation he was not deceived; as, soon after his arrival, the Pope actually signified his intention of setting him to
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THE LIFE OF
work.
