Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/215

1507] have caught something of the dignity and nobleness of Ghirlandajo's Christ in the same chapel; while the mothers and children sitting on the grass, and the boy feeding the lamb, are more in Benozzo Gozzoli's manner. But in the finely draped figures and expressive faces of the listeners, on the left, we trace the hand of a better artist, Cosimo Rosselli's favourite pupil, Piero, who Vasari expressly says, came to Rome with his master, and painted the beautiful landscapes of hill and woodland in the background of both these frescoes. This same refined and imaginative painter, Piero di Cosimo, is now generally recognised to be the artist to whom we owe the Passage of the Red Sea, the fourth fresco formerly ascribed to Cosimo Rosselli in the Sistine Chapel.

Vasari allows Cosimo Rosselli to have been weak in drawing and invention, and very inferior to his companions, but declares that Pope Sixtus IV. was so much delighted with the profusion of gold and ultramarine which he lavished on his frescoes, that he gave him the prize which he had promised to the best master, much to the disgust of the other painters who were working in the Sistina at the same time, and who had laughed at the poverty of his conception and execution. This story, however, is probably a fable of Vasari's invention, and may not be more accurate than the rest of his account of this artist's life and works.

After his return from Rome, in 1486, Cosimo Rosselli painted his fresco of a Miraculous Chalice being borne in procession over the piazza, in the Church of S. Ambrogio, which, in spite of the injuries that it has suffered from the smoke of candles