Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/290

246 given a pension by Lorenzo de' Medici and invited to study the Magnifico's collection of antiques in the garden of San Marco. Through the same influential patron he obtained a commission, in 1478, to paint an altar-piece for a chapel in the Palazzo Pubblico, and, in 1481, signed a contract by which he promised to complete another, for the monks of San Donato, in the space of two and a half years. Neither of these works were ever completed, but the cartoon of the Adoration of the Magi, in the Uffizi, was probably a design for one of the two. This sketch is painted in bistre, or brown monochrome, and a number of preparatory studies, in the Uffizi and other collections, show the infinite amount of time and thought which the artist bestowed upon the subject. The conception is strikingly original. The Virgin is seated in the open air, with tall trees and a spreading palm behind her, and a ruined colonnade and broad flight of stairs rising in front of a rocky landscape. The kings, no longer clad in contemporary costume, but wearing flowing togas, press forward with eager devotion on their faces, and Mary presents her Child to them with a smile of deep inward bliss on her gentle face. The love of horses, which distinguished Leonardo, and which afterwards led him to write a whole treatise on the structure and anatomy of the horse, is already apparent. A number of these animals, in every variety of attitude, standing, lying down, rearing and galloping, are introduced, and a skirmish of cavalry is seen in the background. The whole scene is full of life and animation, and the character and variety of the heads bear witness to the aim "of expressing the movements of the soul through the gestures