Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/326

280 order, and Archbishop Antonino, kneel at her feet, and a fantastic landscape of steep rocks, crowned with palms and buildings, fills up the background. The other altar-piece which he painted about this time, after many delays and prevarications, for his friend the Spedalingo of the Innocenti, is still preserved in that hospital. Here the Virgin is enthroned and the Child bends down to place the ring on St. Katherine's finger, while S. Rosa offers him flowers, and two aged saints and six boy-angels, wreathed with roses and holding lighted tapers, make up the group. Both the reading Magdalen, in a red robe, with pearls in her brown hair, which was until lately the property of the Monte di Pietà in Rome, and the Holy Family, which long bore Signorelli's name, at Dresden, strongly resemble Filippino's works.

But a new and more individual phase of Piero di Cosimo's art is seen in the tempera pictures which he painted for the decoration of the houses and furniture of the cultured Florentines of Lorenzo de' Medici's circle. The romantic bent of his genius throws a faëry glamour over the Greek myths which he renders in so quaint a fashion, whether he paints the nymphs hastening with flowers and fruits, and their little white dog in their arms, to bring back the fair boy Hylas to life, or the faithful hound Lelaps watching over the dead body of Procris on the flowery shore. In taking the loves of Venus and Mars for his subject, and representing the goddess with Cupid and a pet rabbit in her arms, reclining in the myrtle bowers where the god of war slumbers, Piero was bold enough to enter into competition with Botticelli; but if his drawing falls short