After his death Grania lived on in Siena, and two years after, as his executor and trustee, sold two lots of land to one of the Chigi for 1677 florins. Again, in the following year, she sought permission to sell the land which was the portion of her daughter Faustina, and she makes a will which is dated May 22nd, 1518. The man who was said to be her lover afterwards married her daughter Egidia.

We possess several portraits of Pintoricchio from his own hand; all are sufficiently like one another, though painted at different periods of his life, to assure us that they were like the original. The first is in the fresco of the "Argument of St. Catherine," in the Borgia Apartments. The painter at this time must have been about thirty-nine years old. His portrait certainly looks much younger; but he was a thin, dark man who very possibly looked less than his years, or he may have purposely represented himself so, as we notice this in other portraits. The face is an interesting and sensitive one, with speaking eyes and a melancholy expression. In the striking head which he has signed and placed as a picture on the walls of the Virgin's chamber in the chapel of the Baglioni at Spello, the face has sharpened and aged considerably, though it still looks young for a man of fifty-two. The lines have deepened, the mouth is compressed, and the face wears a look of ill-health, almost of suffering. It has the dark, arched brows of the artist, and clever, observant eyes which look out at us, sideways, tending to give a suspicious look, though probably it was only that he saw himself so in a mirror. Again, he stands in the row of portraits in the fresco of the "Canonisation of St. Catherine," in the Library at Siena. This face, too, has an expression of bitterness and melancholy--pinched lips, and sad, regretful eyes.[15] The self-conscious expression of all leads us to suspect that his was a self-tormenting, morbid nature, such as the artistic temperament and keen sense of beauty might well have combined with a sickly body to produce. In the eyes, too, it is easy to read that fantastic touch which came out in his love for story and for the grotesque, and perhaps there is something of that aloofness which the deafness, which led to his nickname, so often gives.

Pintoricchio — Part 11