Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/211

1498] himself as sixty, and his wife as forty, and gives the ages of his seven children as ranging from eighteen to one year. His eldest son, a youth of eighteen, is described as still going to school; the second boy, of thirteen, is studying mathematics; while the dowry of his eldest daughter, Bartolommea, a girl of fifteen, who married a Florentine burgher, is fixed at 350 florins, and that of his youngest, the infant Maria, has not yet been determined. The last mention we find of our artist is in January 1497, when he valued Alessio Baldovinetti's frescoes in the Trinità church, together with Perugino, Filippino Lippi and Cosimo Rosselli. Early in the next year he died, and was buried in the Campo Santo, immediately under his fresco of the history of Joseph, in a tomb which the citizens of Pisa had given him as a reward for his labours twenty years before. Above his grave is a Latin epigram, which expresses the admiration of his contemporaries for the art which had made birds and beasts and fishes, the green woods and the blue vault of heaven, youths and children, fathers and mothers, all live again on these walls, as no other master had ever done before him. Such was the high meed of praise which Benozzo won in his lifetime, and we who judge his merits with more critical eyes may yet own in him a master whose heart beat with quick response for the fair and pleasant things of life, and tender interests of hearth and home, and across whose vision there sometimes dawned gleams of a higher truth and of a more perfect beauty.