Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/266

224 to the convent of S. Margherita, where his mother, Lucrezia, first met the Carmelite friar. This lovely Madonna with the choir of angel-babies in a golden sky, has all the delicate charm and purity of Filippino's early works, and deserves the praise which Vasari bestows upon its perfection. His later pictures at Bologna and Genoa are inferior both in design and workmanship, and even the fine altar-piece which he painted for the Rucellai Chapel, in S. Pancrazio, suffers from the mannerism which mars so much of his later work, while the colour of the picture has been ruined by a coat of dark varnish. A far truer idea of the painter's style is obtained from a fragment of a fresco representing an Angel with clasped hands, which hangs in the same room of the National Gallery.

Filippino's last cycle of frescoes were the scenes from the lives of St. Philip and St. John the Evangelist, in the Strozzi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella, which he began early in 1500, and only finished in 1502, as we learn from an inscription on the triumphal arch in the Resurrection of Drusiana. These paintings were the master's final and most ambitious effort, to which he brought the knowledge and experience of years, and in which he put forth all his powers. They contain, it must be owned, some very striking scenes. The look of strange surprise on the face of the dead woman, who comes to life again, and the mingled horror and amazement of the men who carry the bier, are finely given. The miracle of St. Philip exorcising the dragon in the temple of Mars, while the king's son falls back dying in his servants' arms, is rendered with dramatic effect. But the ex-