Sixtine Chapel, were painted about the same time in Rome. In the former, the Holy Family is housed, as in the tondo in the National Gallery, under a wooden shed erected between the ruined pillars of an older order, a temple or perhaps a palace of kings. It contains some forty figures, besides horses, which Sandro loved to introduce, not always very successfully, into his pictures. Too often, like the charger of Holofernes, they are studied not from life, but from some other model: occasionally, as for example in the Medicean "Adoration," one recognises the real creature. This St. Petersburg "Adoration" is broadly conceived, and full of interest, but it suffers from that conscious and obvious emotion which belongs to Sandro's inferior work. In his best, his figures are pure creations, certain of their purpose, confident of conveying a sense of beauty transcending mere subject-interest; they are not "lifelike," they are ideas and symbols of life, and therefore able to convey the spiritual contact of living forms. This is not the case in any of the Adorations I am describing, nor is it in any of the Sixtine frescoes if we except that of "Moses at the Well."

PLATE VII.—THE VIRGIN AND CHILD WITH ST. JOHN AND AN ANGEL. (From the panel in the National Gallery)

This beautiful painting is no longer ascribed to Botticelli; but it is obviously an indirect, if not a direct, product of his genius. The Virgin is distinct in type from those of the master, and the painting of the Child is dissimilar. The name of Giuliano da San Gallo, one of Sandro's friends, and a famous Florentine architect, is written across the back of the picture.

PLATE VII.—THE VIRGIN AND CHILD WITH ST. JOHN AND AN ANGEL.

But in this marvellous central scene of a large fresco, the very sheep are so intensely realised as to have an individuality over and above their mere sheepiness. By the well, under the great oak tree of the Papal (Rovere) family, Moses is pouring water into the troughs for Zipporah and her sister. His long luxuriant hair falls about a sensitive face. Behind and below him are the sheep, so woolly that you can in fancy pass your hand over their fleeces. On the opposite side of the well are the two Midianitish maidens, standing out, the bright central motive of the whole design; one with her back turned and hands extended, the other walking in a sort of dream, her head drooping forward under the long thick locks of its heavy hair. A skin full of fruit is slung round her waist, and a distaff is in her hand. About this group, whose lines follow those of the well-mouth, the painter has contrived to introduce half-a-dozen other incidents from Moses' life. It was of the little terrier in this picture that Ruskin wrote: "Without any doubt I can assert to you that there is not any other such piece of animal painting in the world—so brief, intense, vivid, and absolutely balanced in truth: as tenderly drawn as if it had been a saint, yet as humorously as Landseer's Lord Chancellor Poodle." He is sure that the dog has been barking all the morning at Moses.

I quote this because it is almost the only passage of Ruskin's which is true to Botticelli's work. Sandro's "Venus" is a creative spirit, she is not a mere individual, but a living Platonic Idea; and through his power of realisation, this little terrier, a mere accessory in the foreground of a great fresco filled with details, has a life of its own. Thus, at its best, his work is not representation at all, nor mere illustration; it is the re-creation in a new medium of the creatures and ideas he has conceived, even to their least characteristics.

The two other Sixtine frescoes represent the "Punishment of Korah," painted in celebration of the revolt and suicide of the Archbishop of Krain; and that known either as the "Leper's Offering," or the "Temptation of Christ," which was also intended to flatter the sensibilities of the Pope.

IV

We now come to the second great division of Sandro's pictures, his Madonnas and Saints, tondos, panels, and altar-pieces, painted for different patrons at intervals during his lifetime. The most celebrated of these are the two tondos, or round panels, of Mary with the Child and several young angels, hanging opposite to one another in the Uffizi. Somewhat similar in design, they are yet essentially different. From its style, the first was probably painted about 1479, and the second in the same period as the "Venus," and the "Bardi Madonna" (1484-1485); the two pictures being thus separated by Sandro's sojourn in Rome. The earlier, that of the "Magnificat," is more brilliant and varied in colour, and of consummate finish: Mary's face is related to that of the "Pallas "; between her and the group of angels on the left is a distant landscape with curving river; behind her shoulder, supporting on one side the celestial crown, which is so much too large to rest upon her head, is a beautiful young angel of a distinctive type which hardly recurs in Sandro's work. This composition, with its intricately curved, and unobtrusively harmonious lines, so perfectly adapted to the circular form, has often been praised. In the later tondo, the Madonna with the Pomegranate, there is no distant scene, but the sense of infinite vista is conveyed by the far-away, pensive expression, not only of the central figure with her slender drooping shoulders, but, as I think, of the Child himself. The grouping is simple, but less perfect than in the earlier work; and there is a lack of harmony between the secular little beings with their wings, flowers, and singing books, and the rapt Mother and Child, which we did not feel in the other, where Madonna herself, guided by the Babe, is writing her song of praise. But here Botticelli has concentrated the religious feeling of the picture in Mary's face, and in it he has struck again the mystical note which vibrates through the whole of his "Venus." Much has been said of the misery of this Madonna; for myself, I see in her face far more of the rapt vision of one who sees immortal things in a mystery. She is not glad because of them, but her whole thought and being is separated by them from the things that change, being set upon the things that endure.

With these two tondos, I must mention for beauty and unity of conception the "Chigi" Madonna and that in the Poldo-Pezzoli Gallery at Milan. The former is generally regarded as among his earlier works. An open casement shows a river winding among wooded hills, a church steeple having been painted in as an afterthought. Mary's attitude, as she fingers the ears of corn thrust among the grapes in the bowl presented by a mysterious garlanded angel, is not unlike that of the "Magnificat," to which the whole composition is related. But Mary herself is of a very different type, more nearly related to the Madonna at Milan of which I shall now speak. She, also, is seated by a window, and like her sister of the "Magnificat" she is reading in a missal with decipherable words. As in that picture too, the Child looks up at her with his hand on hers, a crown of thorns circling his chubby wrist. The colour is rich and harmonious; Mary being magnificently coiffed and clad. Another Madonna in Milan, that in the Ambrosiana Gallery, bears some resemblance both to the Virgin just described, and to her of the "Magnificat." As in the Poldo-Pezzoli Madonna, the glories are either repainted or unusually elaborate, and Mary has a star embroidered on her left shoulder. Here again is the open missal, but now quite undecipherable, resting upon a cushion. It is possible to conceive of the Babe being another version of that