Book excerpt: ""His masters were Bellini and Giorgione, his rivals Michelangelo and Raphael. As you can see, he managed to combine the power of the former and the gentleness of the latter." This is how Vladimir Nabokov expressed his appreciation for Sebastiano del Piombo (ca. 1485-1547) in one of his short stories. During his career, this Renaissance painter developed a powerful, vividly colored style. He also devised a technique of painting in oil on stone, which Michelangelo apparently sneered at as being fit only for use by "women and lazybones like Sebastiano." Because of this criticism, Sebastiano del Piombo was unjustly disregarded for centuries. Kia Vahland amends this view in her lively account of the life and work of this unusual painter."--BOOK JACKET.