stones; you may discover several things like landscapes, battles,
clouds, humorous faces, &c., to furnish the mind with new designs."
[Footnote: Leonardo da Vinci, _Treatise on Painting_.] Cosimo's
mind being fantastic, the pictures he saw were incomparably grotesque.
He delighted in drawing sea monsters, dragons, wonderful adventures,
and heathen scenes; in fact the boy could have learned neither
Christian art nor manners from him. He learned how to use his brush,
however, and, leaving Piero to his minotaurs and dragons, went off at
every spare hour to study at more congenial shrines. He copied Masaccio
at the Brancacci Chapel, and drew so earnestly from the cartoons in the
Hall of the Pope that his achievements reached the ears of Piero
himself, who was not sorry that his pupil surpassed the rest, and gave
him more time for study away from the bottega. Rosini tells us that
"Fra Bartolommeo taught him the first steps." [Footnote: _Storia
della Pittura_, chap, xxvii. p. 2.] The influence of the Frate may
have reached him in two ways. It is not unlikely that Piero di Cosimo
kept up an interest in his old fellow-pupil; and then again, as Andrea
lived in Val Fonda, it is probable he often visited Albertinelli's
studio in that street, and the friendship with Francia Bigio began
before the cartoons of Michelangelo ripened there.

The evidence of style goes to show that the works of Albertinelli and
Fra Bartolommeo influenced him more than those of Piero. Yet though his
sphere was devotional, it was "impelled more by a material sense of
beauty than by the deep religious feeling which inspired the Frate."

As time went on the youth in strange old Piero's studio became more
famous than his master, and felt that he could do greater things away
from the stiff method which cramped him, and the whimsicalities which
annoyed him. His friend, Francia Bigio, Mariotto's pupil, having just