Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/389

In Florence. 359 School of painting of the sixteenth century, by his earnest study of the human form, of which he acquired thorough anatomical knowledge, combined with absolute command of expressing that knowledge in painting : he has been justly called the forerunner of Michelangelo. He was a pupil of Piero della Francesca. His most famous works Fig-. 129. — Zacharias writing- the name of John. By Ghirlandajo. In S. Maria Novella, Florence. are the frescoes in the Chapel of the Virgin in the cathedral of Orvieto, representing the Last Judgment — of which the best part is the Wicked cast out of Heaven, in which the foreshortening is most daring and hitherto unapproached : they were completed in 1503, shortly before the exhibition at Florence of Michelangelo's celebrated Cartoon of Pisa, to which we shall presently refer. He was one of the artists called to Rome by Sixtus IV. to decorate the Sistine