Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/192

158 Santa Croce, and has been in the Casa Buonarroti since the days of Michelangelo. Here the artist's skill in telling a story and his remarkable power of delineating character are already evident, together with a certain elegance of form and gaiety of colour which mark all his works. A little panel representing the trial of a noble Florentine youth, falsely charged of a crime by base-born accusers, is in the Morelli collection at Bergamo, and belongs to the same early period.

After his grandfather's death, in 1446, Pesellino became more closely connected with Fra Filippo, and painted one of his finest predellas for that friar's altar-piece in the Medici Chapel of Santa Croce. These truly wonderful little panels, as Vasari justly calls them, are now divided between the Louvre and the Accademia of Florence. One of the best is the Miracle of St. Anthony of Padua, who is seen pointing from his place in the pulpit to the dead body of an usurer, whose heart has been removed and is discovered in a casket of gold pieces. Both in conception and grouping, these clever and animated scenes show the influence of Fra Lippo's style on his young assistant, but his types are slender and more refined, and the blue and grey tones of his colouring produce a quieter and more harmonious effect. Two other small panels on the legend of St. Sylvester belong to this period, and are now in the Doria Gallery in Rome. But the finest works we have from Pesellino's hand are his version of Boccaccio's story, the Marriage of Griselda, in the Morelli Gallery at Bergamo, and the two famous cassoni with the story of David, which,