Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/170

138 of commissions executed by Baldovinetti between 1449 and 1491, and shows how varied his occupations were. Besides frescoes and altar-pieces for churches, we find entries of household altars for private devotion, panels for the decoration of bedsteads and furniture, marriage chests and shields painted with arms and garlands and inscribed with mottoes, gesso frames, mosaics, cartoons for stained glass and intarsia. In 1454, he painted an Inferno in the Infirmary of the Servi brothers, for Lodovico Gonzaga,—a picture described in the Ricordi as "a Hell with many nudes and furies." Four years later he received eight florins for certain figures round the high altar of S. Egidio, the chapel in the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, which Domenico Veneziano and Andrea del Castagno had adorned with frescoes. He does not, however, mention the fresco of the Nativity, in the cloisters of the Annunziata, which he painted in 1462, for the sum of twenty florins, which had been bequeathed to the Servi friars by a citizen named Arrigucci. This much damaged fresco, the first of a remarkable series by the hands of some of the best Florentine painters, is a characteristic example of Baldovinetti's style. The composition is wanting in unity, the figures are scattered and the interest divided, but the landscape of Val d'Arno is rendered with a truth and love of detail which marks an epoch in art. "Alesso," writes Vasari, "was a very diligent artist, who tried to copy minutely every detail in Mother Nature. He loved painting landscapes exactly as they are, and you see in his pictures, rivers, bridges, rocks, plants, fruit-trees, roads, fields, towns, castles and an infinite number of similar objects. In his Nativity