This part of the work may have been just seen by the Cardinal, who became Pope, September 21st, 1503, dying three weeks later, and bringing Pintoricchio's work to a standstill. His patron's death freed him for the time from his inability to take private orders, and he promptly accepted one from the family of Aringhieri, and between this autumn and the following August, painted the frescoes in the Chapel of San Giovanni in Siena Cathedral; while on March 13th, in the spring of 1505, he was paid for the design of Fortune for the cathedral pavement. Rather before this, the work in the library had been begun, as it was only in abeyance for a little over a year; but the death of Cardinal Andrea Piccolomini in June 1505 again delayed its progress for a short time. Pintoricchio started thereupon on a visit to Rome, which must have been crowded with work if he now accomplished the decoration of the choir of Santa Maria del Popolo, and returned early in 1506 to continue the work in the library. It now went on with no further hindrance. In May or June 1508 all the compartments were finished, and the building handed over to the Piccolomini family, from whom the last payment under the contract was received in January 1509.

There is no document to show exactly when he married, but from the table in Milanesi's edition of Vasari, a daughter, Adriana, who had married a Perugian, died in 1519. She, and probably two others, Faustina and Egidia, must have been born before he left for Siena. There is, however, no trace in the Perugian archives of his wife or children, and Mariotti, writing in 1788, suggests that a search among the documents of Siena may determine the question. Here it is that we find entries of the birth of those children born after he moved to Siena, Giulio Cesare, Camillo Giuliano, and a second Faustina. His wife, as we learn from the petitions she presented after his death, was Grania, daughter of one Niccolò of Bologna or Modena. From the number of her children, and the unhappy relations which seem to have existed between husband and wife, we surmise that Pintoricchio married a woman much younger than himself. If three children were born before 1502, he probably married about 1496-98, at which time he was living in Perugia, after his return from Rome, when he would have been forty-two to forty-four years of age.

Pintoricchio — Part 8