master. The first works that he executed after leaving
the discipline of Mantegna were on the altar of the three Magi in the
Church of the Hospital of S. Cosimo at Verona, where he painted on the
folding-doors that enclose that altar the Circumcision of Christ and the
Flight into Egypt, with other figures. In the Church of the Frati
Ingiesuati, called S. Girolamo, in two angles of a chapel, he painted
the Madonna and the Angel of the Annunciation. And for the Prior of the
Friars of S. Giorgio he executed a little panel-picture of the Manger,
in which he may be seen to have greatly improved his manner, since the
heads of the shepherds and of all the other figures have expressions so
sweet and so beautiful, that this work was much extolled, and that
rightly; and if it were not that the priming of gesso is peeling off
through having been badly prepared, so that the picture is gradually
perishing, it would be enough by itself to keep him alive for ever in
the memory of his fellow-citizens.

Next, having been commissioned by the men who governed the Company of
the Angel Raphael to paint their chapel in the Church of S. Eufemia, he
executed therein two stories of the Angel Raphael in fresco, and in the
altar-piece, in oils, three large Angels, Raphael in the centre, and
Gabriel and Michael on either side, and all with good draughtsmanship
and colouring. He was reproached, indeed, for having made the legs of
those Angels too slender and wanting in softness; to which he made a
pleasant and gracious answer, saying that even as Angels were
represented with wings and with bodies, so to speak, celestial and
ethereal, as if they were birds, so it was only right to make their legs
lean and slender, to the end that they might fly and soar upwards with
greater ease. For that altar of the Church of S. Giorgio where there is
a Christ bearing His Cross, he painted S. Rocco and S. Sebastian, with
some scenes in the predella executed with very beautiful little figures.
And by order of the Company of the Madonna he painted on the predella of
the altar of that Company, in S. Bernardino, the Nativity of the Madonna
and the Massacre of the Innocents, with a great variety of attitudes in
the murderers and in the groups of children whom their mothers are
defending with all their might. This work is held in great veneration,
and is kept covered, the better to preserve it; and it was the reason
that the men of the Fraternity of S. Stefano commission