Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/261

1504] S. Frediano, with Tanai alighting from his horse and embracing his little girl.

By this time the fame of Filippino had reached the ears of Matthias Corvinus, the art-loving King of Hungary, who married Beatrice of Aragon, and employed Leonardo to paint pictures, and Benedetto da Majano to make intarsias, and the young Florentine artist received an invitation to this monarch's court. This, however, he declined, but agreed to paint two altar-pieces, in one of which he introduced the king's portrait, and which he sent to Hungary when he left Florence for Rome, in September 1488. He had been already strongly recommended by Lorenzo de' Medici to Cardinal Caraffa, who had sent to Florence for a painter to decorate a chapel in S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, and who was so much pleased with Filippino when he saw him, that he declared he would not change the artist sent to him by the Magnifico for all the painters of ancient Greece. Before Filippino set out on his journey, he made a will leaving two houses at Prato, which he had inherited from his father, and the property which he owned in Florence, to his mother and sister, and bequeathed the remainder of his estate to the Hospital of S. Maria Nuova, on the condition that a liberal provision of corn, wine, oil, salt meat and wood should be given yearly to his "beloved mother, Lucrezia Buti." On his way to Rome, the painter visited his father's burial-place at Spoleto, and, by Lorenzo de' Medici's command, erected a marble monument to Fra Filippo's memory.

The Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas—that favourite theme of the Dominican Order which