Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/209

1498] their wrist, and gay cavaliers with greyhounds and horses, riding down the mountain-side, or see fair-faced Florentine maidens walking dry-shod over the Red Sea.

A Roman triumphal arch fills up the background of the scene, where Esau sells his birthright for a mess of pottage, and in the other subjects Renaissance palaces and antique temples, Gothic churches and classical monuments, pyramids and cupolas, appear crowded together. The Tower of Babel rears its lofty pile to heaven between the palaces and terraced gardens of a populous city and the rural stillness of a green valley, watered by running streams; and Cosimo de' Medici, the great builder, looks on, surrounded by his sons and grandsons, and his favourite Platonists—Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano and Platina.

The Queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon, another subject, in which a goodly array of Florentine scholars and courtiers are introduced, has been deplorably ruined, and the whole series has suffered terribly from damp and neglect. The execution shows a decided falling-off from Benozzo's earlier works, which is, no doubt, due to the haste with which many of the frescoes were painted, and to his employment of inferior assistants. The drawing of the forms is defective, the figures are stiff and wooden, and lacking in freedom and animation, and there is a certain monotony of form and expression throughout the series which becomes wearisome. Benozzo, we feel, is not an original thinker, and more than once he goes back to his old master, Ghiberti, and imitates the compositions of the bas-reliefs on the Baptistery gates. Most of all, we feel his de-