Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/243

1510] whom Leonardo mentions by name in his Trattato, where he speaks of him as "our Botticello."

The Vespucci family, to which Simonetta belonged, were among Botticelli's best patrons. For their palace in the Via de' Servi he painted a series of graceful subjects, "full of beautiful and animated figures," set in richly carved walnut frames. The panels of the Story of Virginia, at Bergamo, and the Death of Lucrezia, now in America, agree with this description; but the violent action and exaggerated gestures in the similar pictures on the Miracles of St. Zenobius point to a later period. For the Vespucci Botticelli also painted the noble fresco of St. Augustine at his desk in the church of Ognissanti, which in its wonderful energy and rapt expression offers so marked a contrast to the cold decorum of Ghirlandajo's St. Jerome, on the opposite wall. This work bears the date of 1480, in which year, we learn from the register, Sandro was living in the Via S. Lucia near Ognissanti, with his old father Mariano, who was eighty-six years old and unable to work—"non fa più nulla." Giovanni, the eldest son, is here described as a broker; Antonio, the second, a goldsmith, "who also sells books," is at Bologna and has a large family; while Simone, who, as a boy, had gone to Naples in the service of a Florentine merchant, is still living there, and Sandro, whose age is given as thirty-three, is a painter and "works in the house when he chooses."

In the following year, Botticelli went to Rome, on the recommendation of Lorenzo de' Medici, to assist in the decoration of Pope Sixtus the Fourth's new chapel which, built by a Florentine architect, Dolci,