Fiorentino, "Madonna and Child with the young St John the Baptist", 1515 (image courtesty of Stadel Museum)

Rosso's mood seems to have metamorphosed into something much darker at the end of the 1520s. The smiling cupids and playful bambini were replaced by depictions of death and agony. Even his pictures of the Madonna and Child start to have a perceptibly melancholy tinge.

Given what happened to him, perhaps it is hardly surprising. Rosso was in Rome in 1527 on that terrible day when the Imperial army, made up mostly of German Protestant mercenaries, entered the city. They proceeded to murder, rape, rob and desecrate just about everybody and everything they could find. The horribly brutal violence went on for months and only ended when plague erupted and food ran out. Rome's population dropped from about 55,000 at the beginning of 1527 to fewer than 10,000 by the end of 1528. Rosso was captured by the Germans, stripped of everything he owned and forced to do heavy labour. He eventually escaped and managed to find his way to Perugia, and then to Sansepolcro, where he painted a very dark and very strange Deposition from the Cross, which, in addition to depicting Mary fainting over the elongated body of Christ, includes a Roman soldier with his face turning into that of a monkey.

Rosso then left Italy and never returned. His international reputation must have been considerable, because Francis I of France immediately put him in charge of the decoration of the palace at Fontaine-bleau. Vasari relates that the king treated Rosso so generously that he lived like a noble, with horses and troops of servants. He also says that Rosso committed suicide, overcome with shame at having falsely accused one of his friends of stealing from him. No one knows whether that story is true. But it is not impossible that Rosso never recovered from the trauma of living through the Sack of Rome. Suicide over a decade later could have been the result.

Pontormo lived more than 17 years longer than Rosso. With the exception of a couple of years between 1523 and 1525, when he fled to a monastery to escape the plague, he spent his whole life in Florence. Two years after they sacked Rome, Charles V's soldiers surrounded Florence, which had kicked out the Medici and reverted to republican government. Pontormo stayed in the city, and he experienced all the hideousness of the siege. The population was starved into submission within less than a year. The Medici were returned to power. Prominent republicans were executed or exiled. The Imperial troops who had behaved so disgracefully in Rome were comparatively restrained once they got into Florence. But the death toll — the result of starvation and disease rather than murder — was still huge.