Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/246

206 painter himself, clad in a sober suit of black, and wearing an artist's cap on his curly locks.

The frescoes of the Sistina were not finished until August 1483, and before he left Rome, Botticelli painted another Adoration of the Magi, probably the version now at St. Petersburg, in which a ruined arch and a group of horses, evidently suggested by the famous statues on Monte Cavallo, are introduced. This little picture is a gem of the purest water. There are fewer figures than in the Uffizi altar-piece, but these are instinct with life and passion, and are set in a wide and lovely landscape, which goes far to redeem Sandro from Leonardo's reproach of having painted tristissimi paesi. In 1484, Botticelli returned to Florence, but does not seem to have ever executed the important commission of decorating the Hall of Audience in the Palazzo Pubblico, which had been given him in his absence. In the following year, he painted the Berlin altar-piece of the Madonna, throned in a leafy bower between a haggard St. John the Baptist and a white-bearded St. John the Evangelist. The delicate foliage of palm and olive, cypress and myrtle, and the tall white lilies and bowls of red and white roses along the marble parapet, are painted with exquisite care, and the whole effect is singularly decorative. This fine picture, originally executed for the Bardi Chapel in San Spirito, is one of the few of Botticelli's Madonnas to which we can assign a date with any certainty, since a document in the Guiccardini archives records a payment of twenty-eight florins, in February 1485, to the carpenter who supplied the wood, and of seventy-eight florins, in the following August, to "Sandro del Botticiello" for the time and