Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/239

1510] the return of spring and the beauty of the young Maytime which was the favourite theme of Tuscan poets. All the bright and pleasant imagery of Lorenzo's Ambra, or the Rusticus of Poliziano, lives again in this fair picture of the "laurel groves which sheltered the singing-birds who carolled to the Tuscan spring." Here Queen Venus holds her court and Spring comes, garlanded with roses, while flowers spring up at her feet, and the Graces dance hand in hand under myrtle bowers. There Zephyr sports with Flora, dropping roses from her lips, and Mercury, in the form of Giuliano, scatters the clouds of winter, all unaware that Cupid is aiming an arrow at his heart. But the shadow of coming doom hung over these dreams of love and joy. Before Poliziano had finished his poem, fair Simonetta died suddenly, and was borne, with her face uncovered, to the grave, amid the tears and lamentations of all Florence. Two years afterwards, on the 26th April, 1478, Giuliano was murdered, by the treachery of the Pazzi, during high mass in the Duomo, and fell pierced with nineteen wounds before the altar. Botticelli was employed to paint the effigies of the conspirators on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico, and when, in 1480, Lorenzo returned safely from his perilous mission to the court of Naples, Sandro celebrated the triumph of the Medici over their foes in his picture of Pallas subduing the Centaur. Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples are seen in the distance, and in the foreground the Centaur, emblem of anarchy and crime, cowers before the victorious goddess, who, wreathed with olive boughs and wearing the interlaced rings of the Medici on her