Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/172

140 saints stand on either side. Very similar in style is the altar-piece of the Trinity, in the Accademia, for which Baldovinetti received eighty-nine florins, and which he painted in 1472, for the high altar of the Trinità, at the desire of Bongianni Gianfigliazzi. The idea of the angels floating on the clouds and drawing back the curtain to display the heavenly vision was finely conceived and well executed; but the picture is in a bad condition, and much of the colour has been destroyed. This same Gianfigliazzi, we learn from Alesso's records, was the patron who, in July 1471, gave him the great work of his life, the frescoes in the choir of the Trinità. The painter had promised to finish the series in seven years, for the sum of 200 florins, but the task proved far more arduous than he had expected, and it was only in January 1497 that his work was at length completed. Four masters of repute, Cosimo Rosselli, Benozzo Gozzoli, Pietro Perugino and Filippino Lippi, were then called to value the frescoes, and fixed the price at 1000 florins. These works, to which Baldovinetti devoted the best years of his life, and in which he introduced portraits of the Medici and their most illustrious contemporaries, were destroyed in 1760, when the choir was rebuilt, and the only fragments now to be seen are the figures of the Patriarchs on the ceiling, which have been lately brought to light, and a portrait of the painter in a red mantle, with a green cloth on his head and a white handkerchief in his hand, which is now in the Morelli collection at Bergamo.

Alesso's journal ends in 1491, when his time and thoughts were absorbed in this great work. The