Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/327

1521] of Sandro's vigorous line, his landscape, with the rose-bushes and blue lake sleeping in the clear sunshine, is far more lovely. Like several of his contemporaries, it is plain, he had studied the minute rendering of objects in Hugo van der Goes' triptych and other Flemish landscapes, and had learnt from their example to reproduce every detail with what Vasari calls "almost incredible patience."

The panels of the story of Perseus and Andromeda, in the Uffizi, were ordered by Filippo Strozzi, and are executed in oils, a medium in which Piero loved to make experiments, and in which he strove to emulate Leonardo's sfumato tints and effects of chiaroscuro. The influence of this great master is strongly marked in his later works, such as the Borghese Madonna, the Judgment of Solomon in the same collection, and the larger Uffizi panel, in which he repeats the subject of Andromeda's deliverance, and introduces a group of musicians celebrating the triumph of Perseus. An old inventory, of 1589, states that the figures in this beautiful painting were drawn by Leonardo, probably when he was in Florence in the first years of the sixteenth century, although the colouring and landscape are plainly Piero's work. And it is worthy of note that Piero di Cosimo is one of the few Florentine masters whose name appears in Leonardo's note-books.

The "horrid sea-monster" which this master painted for Leonardo's patron, Giuliano de' Medici, and the satyrs, fauns, and bacchantes with which he decorated panels in the Vespucci Palace, have been lost, but one work which he executed for the same noble family is fortunately still in existence.