Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/208

166 wards that he was summoned to Home by Sixtus IV., to decorate the walls of his. new chapel in the Vatican. Among the great scenes in fresco painted, on those walls by Domenico Qhirlandaio, Gosimo Rosselli, Signorelli, and Perugino, three subjects from tho hand of Botticelli hold their place with the noblest. They represent the Life of Moses, the Destruction of Koran, Dathan, and Abiram, and the Temptation of Christ. In 1482, probably after his return from Rome, he received a commission to paint in the Sala dell Udienza at Florence, together with Domenico Ghirlandaio. Many of the works already men tioned probably fall within the next ten years of Botticelli s manhood. The Boccaccio series belongs to 1487. In 1491 he was engaged, together with the brothers Ghirlandaio, upon some mosaic decorations in the cathedral of Florence which have unhappily perished. Soon after this time there came into his life a new influence which greatly changed it. It is well known how the genius of the Dominican Savonarola swept like a storm over the affairs of Italy, and what a revolution, after the passage of the French king- through Florence, he brought about in the temper and policy of the republic, driving out the merchant family who had been its untitled masters for half a century, establishing in place of their rule a new theocracy of which he was himself the oracle and minister, turning the hearts of old and young away from tho world and from their lusts. Many of the first artists of the city became his most ardent followers, and among them Botticelli. &quot;What the actual effect of his conversion was upon him we have scanty means of judging, but it needs must have put an end to his painting of those old mythologies, over which in earlier clays his imagination had been used to throw so singular a charm. Vasari, a devoted servant of the later Medici, and therefore a traducer of the greatest enemy that house had ever had, speaks of Savonarola s influence upon Botticelli as altogether disastrous, saying that he was &quot; obstinate upon that side,&quot; &quot; a partisan of the sect of Savonarola in such a fashion that, abandoning painting ancl having no income to lire upon, he fell into the utmost disorder ; &quot; and again how, &quot; playing the Piagnoue (the name given to the followers of Savonarola), he fell out of the way of painting, and thereby at last found himself old and poor in such a sort that if Lorenzo Medici, as long as he lived, had not supported him, and afterwards his friends and many worthy men who felt au affection for his virtues, he would, we may say, have died of hunger.&quot; We have few materials by which we can test the accuracy of this account. We know that in 1496 the young Michelangelo sent through his hands a letter addressed to this Lorenzo de Medici (Lorenzo the younger, that is, the son of Giuliano); that in 1498 he was living with a brother in the quarter called Sta Lucia of Ognissanti ; that in 1503 he was consulted along with other artists as to the best place for Michelangelo s colossal statue of David. But of more importance and significance than all this is a beautiful picture of a Nativity with mystical by-scenes, in the possession of Mr Fuller Maitland, which bears an inscription in base Greek by the master himself. The inscription seems to construe thus : &quot; This picture I, Alessandro, painted at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, in the half-time after the time, during the fulfilment of the eleventh of John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, in the loosing of the devil for three and a half years. Afterwards he shall be chained according to the twelfth of John, and we shall see him trodden down as this picture.&quot; Hence it appears to be established that Botticelli, a year and a half after the downfall and execu tion of Savonarola, had his mind full of his instructions and prophecies; that he regarded the death of the Dominican reformer and his companions as the fulfilment of the Apocalyptic prophecies about the slaying of the witnesses ; that he thought of the tribulations among which he lived as the &quot; second woe &quot; of Rev. xi., and as coincident with the &quot; time, times, and half a time &quot; of that and other prophetic writings ; and finally such is the originality and excellence of the work that his imagination had at this time lost none of its fire nor his hand of its cunning. We are quite without the means of deciding whether any proportion of the large existing mass of his undated works belong to the years following this ; or whether we are really to think of him as failing in his wonted industry in his latter days, from regret and disappointment at his master s fate and;at public affairs, from pre-occupation over mystical theology (which had always had an attraction for him, and, in the case of the picture painted early in his life for Matteo Palmieri, had brought upon him a charge of heresy), or, lastly, from another cause which Vasari alleges, but which we have designedly passed by till this place. In the history of engraving there are no productions more precious, more interesting, or more problematical than a number of plates executed in a primitive style, with severe outlines and straight lines of shading, by artists of the Florentine school towards the close of the 15th century. The engravings in this manner include some two hundred and fifty pieces, covering the whole range of subjects that interested the mind of Italy at this most active and fanci ful moment of the early Renaissance. The best known of these engravings are as follows : three designs to ths earliest book published in Florence with engraved illustra tions, called II Monte Sancto di Dio (1471); a set of nineteen designs to an edition of the Divina Commedia of Dante (1481) ; a set of twenty-four Prophets; a set of twelve Sibyls ; several subjects of Saints ; several of mythology, such as the Death of Paris, Theseus and Ariadne, the Judgment of Paris, Loves in a Vineyard, and the like ; a famous series (long falsely ascribed to Mantegna, whose manner in engraving is easily distinguishable from this) of the Ranks and Professions of Men, the Virtues, the Arts and Sciences, the Muses, and the Planets (fifty in all) ; a series of fifteen setting forth the lives of Mary and of Christ ; a subject of the deluge ; another of the preaching of the Franciscan Fra Marco, and many more. Between the various examples of this large class there are considerable differences, but they are all unlike the work of any other school, and all manifestly Florentine of the 15th century. Conjectures the most confident and at the same time the most conflicting have been put forward as to their author ship. All such conjectures alike have been based on a few passages in Vasari s lives of Botticelli and of Marc Antonio. According to Vasari, the first Florentine who took impres sions on paper from engravings was Maso Finiguerra, and he, says our author, was &quot; followed by Baccio Balctini, who not having much power of designing, all that he did was with the invention and design of Sandro Botticelli.&quot; And again, Vasari says of Botticelli that, &quot;from being a sophis tical (i.e., thoughtful or ingenious) person, he commented a part of Dante, and made figures for the Inferno, and put them into print; upon which pursuit he spent a deal of time; so that not working&quot; (i.e., at painting) &quot;it was a cause of infinite disorders in his life. He put in print many more things of his own from designs which he had made, but in a bad manner.&quot; On the strength of these passages this whole class of early Florentine engravings has generally been put down by connoisseurs, as, for instance, Young Ottley, Bartsch, and Passavant, as the work of Sandro B jtticelli and Baccio Baldini, jointly or apart, each critic attributing separate subjects to the one or the other of the artists according to his private canon of internal evidence. But a scrupulous examination shows this internal evidence to be both very meagre and very contradictory. Nor can much be built upon the external 