LOMBARDY 



very best he could about his friends — or a little more — 

 and did not hesitate to say the worst of those who were 

 his rivals. " Everything he tells us about the Floren- 

 tine artists still living at the beginning of the sixteenth 

 century has the value of living tradition, although allow- 

 ance must be made for his occasionally becoming the 

 mouthpiece of still smouldering hatreds, which make 

 him a partisan even in matters of the past. His point 

 of view, furthermore, is grossly provincial, not to say 

 municipal, and his opinion as to the relative importance 

 of Florentine art in general is not to be taken without 

 criticism, and still less his estimates of artists such as 

 Perugino, Pinturicchio, or Sodoma, who came from the 

 outside to spoil the trade of Florentines and Tuscans." ^ 



An Adoration (Milan, Brera) by Gaudenzio Ferrari Ferrari, 

 contains in one of the panels an elaborately dressed 

 youth on horseback with a hawk on his hand. A 

 monkey sits behind him. In the foreground a man is 

 holding a leopard which has a strong chain wrapped 

 twice round its neck. No doubt it is meant for the 

 hunting leopard, but it is covered at regular intervals 

 with spots, in groups of three, as though put on with 

 a stencil. A quaint little curly dog accompanies a 

 dwarf in the middle panel, and in that on the left 

 there is a camel. 



^ study atid Criticism of Italian Art, second series, 1902, p. 117. 



Ill 



