animated scene representing the ritual for the purification of a leper). On these three frescoes Botticelli laboured for about a year and a half at the height of his powers, and they may be taken as the central and most important productions of his career, though they are far from being the best-known, and from their situation on the dimmed and stained walls of the chapel are by no means easy of inspection. Skill in the interlinking of complicated groups; in the principal actors energy of dramatic action and expression not yet overstrained, as it came to be in the artist’s later work; an incisive vigour of portraiture in the personages of the male bystanders; in the faces and figures of the women an equally vital grasp of the model, combined with that peculiar strain of haunting and melancholy grace which is this artist’s own; the most expressive care and skill in linear draughtsmanship, the richest and most inventive charm in fanciful costume and decorative colouring, all combine to distinguish them. During this time of his stay in Rome (1481–1482) Botticelli is recorded also to have painted another “Adoration of the Magi,” his fifth or sixth embodiment of the same subject; this has been identified, no doubt rightly, with a picture now in the Hermitage gallery at St Petersburg.
Returning to Florence towards the end of 1482, Botticelli worked there for the next ten years, until the death of Lorenzo Il Magnifico in 1492, with but slight variations in manner and sentiment, in the now formed manner of his middle life. Some of the recorded works of this time have perished; but a good many have been preserved, and except in the few cases where the dates of commission and payment can be established by existing records, their sequence can only be conjectured from internal evidence. A scheme of work which he was to have undertaken with other artists in the Sala dei Gigli in the Palazzo Pubblico came to nothing (1483); a set of important mythologic frescoes carried out by him in the vestibule of a villa of Lorenzo Il Magnifico at Spedaletto near Volterra in 1484 has been destroyed by the effects first of damp and then of fire. To 1482–1483 belongs the fine altar-piece of San Barnabo (a Madonna and Child with six saints and four angels), now in the academy at Florence. Very nearly of the same time must be the most popular and most often copied, though very far from the best-preserved, of his works, the round picture of the Madonna with singing angels in the Uffizi, known, from the text written in the open choir-book, as the “Magnificat.” Somewhere near this must be placed the beautiful and highly finished drawing of “Abundance,” which has passed through the Rogers, Morris Moore and Malcolm collections into the British Museum, as well as a small Madonna in the Poldi-Pezzoli collection at Milan, and the fine full-faced portrait of a young man, probably some pupil or apprentice in the studio, at the National Gallery (No. 626). For the marriage of Antonio Pucci to Lucrezia Dini in 1483 Botticelli designed, and his pupils or assistants carried out, the interesting and dramatic set of four panels illustrating Boccaccio’s tale of Nastagio degl’ Onesti, which were formerly in the collection of Mr Barker and are now dispersed. His magnificent and perfectly preserved altar-piece of the Madonna between the two saints John, now in the Berlin gallery, was painted for the Bardi chapel in the church of San Spirito in 1486. In the same year he helped to celebrate the marriage of Lorenzo Tornabuoni with Giovanna degli Albizzi by an exquisite pair of symbolical frescoes, the remains of which, after they had been brought to light from under a coat of whitewash on the walls of the Villa Lemmi, were removed in 1882 to the Louvre. Within a few years of the same date (1485–1488) should apparently be placed that second masterpiece of fanciful classicism done for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco’s villa at Castello, the “Birth of Venus,” now in the Uffizi, the design of which seems to have been chiefly inspired by the “Stanze” of Poliziano, perhaps also by the Pervigilium Veneris; together with the scarcely less admirable “Mars and Venus” of the National Gallery, conceived in the master’s peculiar vein of virile sanity mingled with exquisite caprice; and the most beautiful and characteristic of all his Madonnas, the round of the “Virgin with the Pomegranate” (Uffizi). The fine picture of “Pallas and the Centaur,” rediscovered after an occultation of many years in the private apartments of the Pitti Palace, would seem to belong to about 1488, and to celebrate the security of Florentine affairs and the quelling of the spirit of tumult in the last years of the power of the great Lorenzo (1488–1490). “The Annunciation” from the convent of Cestello, now in the Uffizi, shows a design adapted from Donatello, and expressive, in its bending movements and vehement gestures, of that agitation of spirit the signs of which become increasingly perceptible in Botticelli’s work from about this time until the end. The great altar-piece at San Marco with its predelle, commissioned by the Arte della Seta in 1488 and finished in 1490, with the incomparable ring of dancing and quiring angels encircling the crowned Virgin in the upper sky, is the last of Botticelli’s altar-pieces on a great scale. To nearly the same date probably belongs his deeply felt and beautifully preserved small painting of the “Last Communion of St Jerome” belonging to the Marchese Farinola.
In 1490 Botticelli was called to take part with other artists in a consultation as to the completion of the façade of the Duomo, and to bear a share with Alessio Baldovinetti and others in the mosaic decorations of the chapel of San Zenobio in the same church. The death of Lorenzo Il Magnifico in 1492, and the accession to chief power of his worthless son Piero, soon plunged Florence into political troubles, to which were by and by added the profound spiritual agitation consequent upon the preaching and influence of Savonarola. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who with his brother Giovanni was in a position of political rivalry against their cousin Piero, continued his patronage of Botticelli; and it was for him, apparently chiefly between the years 1492 and 1495, that the master undertook to execute a set of drawings in illustration of Dante on a far more elaborate and ambitious plan than the little designs for the engraver which had been interrupted in 1481. Eighty-five of these drawings are in the famous manuscript acquired for the Berlin museum at the sale of the Hamilton Palace collection in 1882, and eleven more in the Vatican library at Rome. The series is one of the most interesting that has been preserved by any ancient master; revealing an intimate knowledge of and profound sympathy with the text; full of Botticelli’s characteristic poetic yearning and vehemence of expression, his half-childish intensity of vision; exquisite in lightness of touch and in swaying, rhythmical grace of linear composition and design. These gifts were less suited on the whole to the illustration of the Hell than of the later parts of the poem, and in the fiercer episodes there is often some puerility and inadequacy of invention. Throughout the Hell and Purgatory Botticelli maintains a careful adherence to the text, illustrating the several progressive incidents of each canto on a single page in the old-fashioned way. In the Paradise he gives a freer rein to his invention, and his designs become less a literal illustration of the text than an imaginative commentary on it. Almost all interest is centred on the persons of Dante and Beatrice, who are shown us again and again in various phases of ascending progress and rapt contemplation, often with little more than a bare symbolical suggestion of the beatific visions presented to them. Most of the drawings remain in pen outline only over a light preliminary sketch with the lead stylus; all were probably intended to be finished in colour, as a few actually are. To the period of these drawings (1492–1497) would seem to belong the fine and finely preserved small round of the “Virgin and Child with Angels” at the Ambrosiana, Milan, and the famous “Calumny of Apelles” at the Uffizi, inspired no doubt by some contemporary translation of the text by Lucian, and equally remarkable by a certain feverish energy in its sentiment and composition, and by its exquisite finish and richness of execution and detail. Probably the small “St Augustine” in the Uffizi, the injured “Judith with the head of Holofernes” in the Kaufmann collection at Berlin, and the “Virgin and Child with St John,” belonging to Mr Heseltine in London, are works of the same period.
Simone di Mariano, a brother of Botticelli long resident at Naples, returned to Florence in 1493 and shared Sandro’s home in the Via Nuova. He soon became a devoted follower of
