Note 14 — BOOK III.

The commentators of Vasari remark, that when he uses this phrase, he refers to the year of the death of the artist, or to the period when he relinquished his art. Pietro must therefore have become blind about the year 1458, in the sixtieth year of his age, and must have died about 1484, aged eighty-six. This painter was intimately connected with the family of Vasari. Lazaro the great-grandfather of Vasari, who died in 1452, was the friend and imitator of Pietro, and some time before his death assigned him his nephew Signorelli as a scholar. We must, therefore, give credit to Vasari's account of Borghese; for if we discredit him on this occasion, as some have done, when are we to believe him? It is true, indeed, that he is guilty of a strange anachronism in mentioning Guidubaldo, the old Duke of Urbino, as his first patron; but this kind of error is frequent in him, and not to be regarded.